It’s Saturday morning, as I was finishing my coffee hatching plans for my SOS post it started pouring down rain! After checking my trusty (ha!) weather app on my phone, it was suggested this was going on for quite a while. So, this Saturday we have views of what can be seen in my garden from the front and back porch without getting too wet.
The kitchen seemed like a good place to start. This is my first Thai dessert mango of the year (Nam Doc Mai). It is not quite ripe. It should have a fully developed peach color and floral fragrance before peeling and eating. I am finding it is a bit of a trick to pick and ripen the perfect mango. Sometimes they fall off the tree and it is okay, sometimes not. If picked too soon they don’t ripen at all.
Mango blueberry upside down cakes (pineapple as well) These are made with Glenn mangos from my other tree.
I am still at work on the Coleus tree. I pruned it back again this week. I think it might need a harder prune to develop a nicer top.
Turkey Tangle Frog Fruit (Phlya nodiflora) lawn is finally growing in. ‘Bossa Nova’ Neoregelia bromeliads in the foreground.
I have been waiting for this flower. Grown from seed. This is a Zin Master Zinnia. I thought it was going to be bigger! The plants are just huge and beautiful.
King of Siam Croton (Codieum varigatum). A new addition to the garden this spring, finally showing its coral spots.
That is my Six for this Saturday. Visit Jim at Garden Ruminations to see more SOS posts. I will be in the kitchen contemplating more mango desserts.
The Shrub Queen 
Lovely first zinnia and mango… those cakes look so good! It is too hot for me to think about starting an oven, but at least today is a bit cooler. We aren’t use to heat and humidity up here… but I guess we better get used to it!
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Thanks, Eliza – they are vegan! I was astonished to see the temps in New England, at least 10 degrees hotter than here. Crazy. Did your garden wilt or did you at least get some rain to go with it?
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The first day was hot and dry, but we’ve been having thunderstorms since Wed. (close to 3″ of rain). Between the heat and the rain, the garden is leaping!
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That is great, the rain really helps with the garden, it is hard to water the heat away.
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Between the two elements, the garden is flourishing. 🙂
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*ugh I’m having problems commenting on WP again so odd. Your cake looks delicious, I hope you enjoy your weekend!
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Thanks, Tracy. The different platforms make it difficult to post where you don’t blog. I have a hard time with blogspot sometimes.
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Turkey Tangle Frog Fruit, now that is a real tongue twister. 😊 Your upside down cakes look great.
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It is fun to have just for the name. I have been on a great upside down cake experiment for a while.
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I would love to grow Turkey Tangle Frog Fruit just for its name. And I am so jealous of your mangoes and delicious cake. I didn’t know you could make coleus into trees. Well done for your pretty seed grown zinnia. I haven’t come across Zin Master.
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I think you can buy TTFF in the UK as a hanging basket. I am hoarding the mangoes! so many of the good ones just don’t ship well. The coleus tree is a pruning coincidence. I bought the zinnias from an obscure nursery in North Carolina US – they are supposedly a mixture, but are looking suspiciously the same. Just buds now.
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Your coleus is so interesting. Keep us up to date on its progress. I see you also use pine straw, so far the HOA has not written me up on it. That is a pretty zinnia. I am recycling through the seeds I collected last year and they actually came up.
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The coleus tree is a strange thing. The leaves get really big if they stay on for a long time. I prefer pinestraw, I have a shell driveway and the bark in the shell drives me crazy. I had a few generations of Envy zinnias and they started to get weird.
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I do like the sound of a Turkey Tangle foot lawn. I have one acquired just a couple years ago or so but it has pink flowers whereas yours look yellow. I guess there must be different types.
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I am hoping it fills in a lot more! Growing surprisingly slowly. the yellow flowers are from a native purslane mixed in, the TTFF is pink flowering.
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That sounds a great combination. My TTF dies back here during the winter but grows well again in the spring.
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So interesting you have TTF in the garden. It is a wildflower here, but I guess everything starts that way. It is evergreen here but looks better in summer. There are a couple of native purslanes in there with it. Hot pink and yellow.
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So happy your tangly frog lawn is filling in! I’m thinking of frogs because the tree frogs are staging their nightly operetta right now, outside the window, as it rains!
I love the idea of a coleus tree…
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I am happy about the lawn as well, it has taken a lot of work. Our tree frogs have been going mad with all the rain.
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Tee hee, . . . turkey tangle frog fruit. I would grow it just to be able to brag about it. A bit of Bergenia crassifolia inhabits some of our landscapes. Most know it simply as berenia or winter berenia. I like to refer to it as pigsqueak.
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I am sure its available in California. I think they call it by its latin name. Who knows how a turkey got tangles in it??
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I purchase almost nothing from nurseries, so have lost track of what is available nowadays.
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The desserts look great, as does that Zinnia! Good luck with the mango picking. We are having a similar problem with cherries at the moment… trying to pick them ripe enough just before the birds get them, since they seem to know which ones are perfectly ripe! LOL!
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It is difficult to outsmart the animals! And annoying to walk out and see a squirrel sitting below the tree munching on a mango!
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You have squirrels? Oh dear!
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Many squirrels, rabbits and fruit eating lizards.
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