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Saturday, December 10, 2022

Harvesting Moringa



Have you heard about Moringa trees? The leaves are considered a super food, full of goodness. I use the leaves as tea. You can buy powdered Moringa to take as capsules too.  You should Google it, perhaps a Moringa tree is in your future.  I planted my Moringa tree from seed in May of 2021. Typically, these trees grow extremely fast, many feet each year, but mine struggled for the first year. My ground is so hard I don't believe it's tap root could penetrate deep enough to give it the start it needed. Moringas love the heat and as this summer began, it slowly started to grow, and after a few rains it really took off. It went from about 2 feet tall to just over 14 foot this year. I wanted to begin to harvest the leaves but chose to wait until the last minute. I noticed the flavor of the leaves changed from a mild radish taste to more of a spinach flavor, I'm not sure what that means. Next year the tree will be larger, and I will harvest as I have need.



I began to pull off the leaves that I could reach, then used a small saw to cut off the limbs. This will cause the tree to produce many more limbs next spring. The wood is pretty soft because it is such a fast-growing tree. 


I had a helper.





In the house, I tied several stems together and hung them from a curtain rod.


They dried within a week.  A little squeeze and the leaves easily fall off the stems. 


I spread them on cookie sheets to further clean out the small stems and make sure every leaf was completely dry.


This gallon jar should keep me in tea until the tree is producing next spring. 















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