Hawaii Gardens: Fruit trees can offer bounty to be shared with ohana

One goal for sustainability is planting a fruit tree in every yard. Or even on your apartment lanai.

Remember when every yard had at least one fruit tree and lots of vegetables — all kinds of things for the family to eat and to share?

The bounty would be shared with ohana, given as gifts to the neighbors or you’d take a generous bag to work.

Kupuna Pua Mendonca of Hawaii island shared some simple wisdom with me at an aquaponics training conference in Hilo: Avocado, niu (coconut) and ulu (breadfruit) trees are good to grow for sustenance. The healthy fats and oils of the fruit will get you through times of hardship and scarcity. Plus it’s handy to have some degree of self-sufficiency.

So, let’s grow some supplies in our gardens.

I was recently visiting my great gardener neighbor Joan Takamori and admiring her plush and fruitful garden. We spoke about how macadamia nuts are another tree that more of us should propagate and grow. She asked me about a macadamia nutcracker since she had an abundance of macadamias from her mother’s garden.

I laughed, recounting our nutcracker as kids. It was a big pohaku in the rock wall, that was flat on top and had an almost perfectly sized mac nut puka. We would set in a nut, and hit it “just right” with a small sledgehammer. Sometimes it cracked open perfectly; sometimes we smashed too hard and the nut went flying!

Without knowing it, this is how I learned about scarification, a technique to help tough thick-shelled seeds to germinate and grow. The nuts we nicked that flew down the sloping yard eventually grew into seedlings.

Once on a trip to visit my Aunty Ruth in California, I brought her a gift of a big paper bag of macadamia nuts. I explained to her and my cousins how we cracked mac nuts at home. But my California relatives had a better plan. My Uncle Merle was an engineer so he had a vise in their garage. It was a big thrill for my cousins and their neighborhood friends to come over and take their turn at cracking a nut.

My aunty then roasted the nuts in the oven and covered them with chocolate. Back home, we generally just ate them raw.

We never had our own macdamia tree in our yard when I was growing up. My mom planted one about 10 to 15 years ago. She wanted to see it flower and fruit. It’s now a very fruitful tree. I want to grow more of them, so I’ve been collecting seedlings, from under her tree to grow and share and plant in my current garden.

Mac nuts need to be scarified to germinate. The thick hard shell is nicked or filed down a bit so water can penetrate and activate the embryo of the seed to grow. Plant them in pots with quality potting mix, and water daily, until they get big enough to go into the ground.

They eventually grow into a pretty tree with deep green ruffly leaves and fragrant flower stalks. If you look closely at the flowers, you will see they look like miniatures of one of our favorite modern-day florist ornamentals: Proteas. The trees belong to the Proteaceae plant family and are native to Australia.

You should be able to find macadamia trees at your favorite garden shop. Or call ahead and visit a fruit tree specialty nursery.

Heidi Bornhorst is a sustainable landscape consultant specializing in native, xeric and edible gardens. Reach her at heidibornhorst@gmail.com.