For a few years I have been hearing a lot about Moringa and its incredible nutritional properties, during my field work in the Project "Sowing a Country" I had to visit quite a few rural regions of Venezuela (this was before the pandemic , I currently work from home) and in several places the people I used to get told me things like "I'm doing the Moringa diet to lose weight" or "I planted some Moringa plants because they told me it's great to health".
Being a member of this Project I certainly do not question popular wisdom but I am also used to researching; therefore I consulted different publications on the Internet in official sites such as the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and I called a couple of friends who are Naturopathic Physicians to advise me well on the subject. The result was that Moringa has a high nutritional content in its leaves and that it has medicinal properties such as reducing blood sugar; which is good for those with high blood sugar but bad for those who are hypoglycemic.
The fact is that Moringa is an excellent food, but I would not recommend anyone to do diets where Moringa is only consumed at breakfast to lose weight; Due to its high nutritional content, this food tends to be taken as a kind of super-food that contains all the necessary nutrients, but this is false since such food does not exist in nature.
Due to its nutritional properties and its health benefits (I consume sugar in large quantities) they led me to be interested in its cultivation and thanks to a farmer friend I obtained the seeds, so without wasting time I made some seedbeds in the backyard of my house to play them.
In a week they began to sprout and from then on began a friendship that has been going on for two years and counting. For me here everything was new and unknown, since we have never made content about this crop in the project nor have we studied it beyond my personal research. One of the surprises that I took with these plants is that they produce from a very young age and that from their nursery stage you can harvest leaves that are suitable for consumption.
I made my seedbed in the plastic bags used by nurseries and farmers in fruit plantations, the intention was to take the plants about 4 or 6 months later to a plot that I have in Barlovento (Miranda State, Venezuela). With the time that passed I realized that these plants (unlike many others that I have grown) were not attacked by any pests, they developed quickly and we also began to use the leaves that were harvested from the seedbed on a daily basis.
So at home we began to like the idea of having even one plant very close by and we decided to use one of the largest pots that we had for its cultivation since our patio does not have land areas. Although the cultivation of fruit trees in pots can be quite uncertain since in most cases the plant does not produce flowers or fruits since they need more space, we think that this being a crop where the main product to obtain would be the leaves. there should be no problem.
And so we take some of the plants and transplant them to the pot; This plant developed more and more until it reached more than two meters, yielding a large quantity of leaves each harvest, and its stem grew thicker. Every time the plant grew too large, it was drastically pruned and within a few days of the pruned stem, several new twigs came out that began their development with great force.
Moringa became very easy for me to grow and became one of the strategic foods at home, so I began to think about transplanting more of these plants to pots. At the end of the day, of the more than 10 plants that I was going to take to the plot, I took only 2 and the others stayed here at home, turning my garden into a small plantation of moringas hehehehehe😉
But the story does not end here, over time I noticed that the plant gave flowers😮 something that did not scare me because I was growing it in pots; And even more was my surprise when the plant also began to give pods and these to develop optimally to the point of giving fertile seeds from which new plants can be obtained.
So now I have some beautiful Moringa plants that brighten my life every day and that have even become taller than my house (which is made up of a ground floor and a first floor). Every time I see them I feel happy, proud and extremely satisfied to have taken care of these beauties since they were just little plants growing in my seedbed.
For me these plants are not only some living organisms that I have in the garden, they are my daughters, they are my friends; I have cared for them, I have fed them and now they feed me and are also part of the purification of my own air. They are not selfish plants; I have planted other plants around them and they share perfectly with them, they are not attacked by pests and they attract a Hummingbird every afternoon (which I have not yet managed to take a photo of).
I end with a photo of the first plant that I transplanted and which is the largest and most developed of all, this plant I shared and enjoyed every day with my mother (who is no longer with me because she passed away last year😥). I have many memories of the last few months with my mom in her yard with her and looking at the hummingbird every afternoon, as well as talking about how beautiful the Moringas were.
I plan to keep these plants and continue taking care of them, I also intend to reproduce them and bring more to my plot. Thank you for your attention and for visiting me.