Natty by Nature

Natty by Nature Plant to Plate
Landscaping, Foraging, Grafting, and Cooking in the 808– O'ahu, Hawai'i

04/26/2026

Know your natives!

In the last few years, great native restoration areas have been added to many of the hiking trails around Hawai’i, like this one on the Moanlua Valley Trail with beautiful native Hawaiian and canoe plants like mamaki, koa, kou, ‘ūlei, loulu, ‘ae’ae, uhi uhi, kamani, hala, kukui, and many more.

They’re not currently tagged so you might need a good plant ID app like iNaturalist to recognize what these are and look up on sites like or Native Hawaiian Plants for their medicinal uses. But please never harvest these natives from the wild, but rather just enjoy their beauty and see which ones you like, and then get them from one of the many nurseries growing natives around the island like and grow them at home.

Plants like mamaki (Pipturus albidus) are great not only for its well known use as a relaxing tea, but also to fight high blood pressure, treating wounds, and as a laxative. ‘Ae’ae or Bacopa monieri lis sold everywhere online (and has lab studies to back it up) for helping memory.

Also be aware of the pests that may attack the plants like the coconut rhinoceros beetle (CRB) that has killed many native loulu palms even if they were protected preemptively with netting like in this spot.

Despite some pests, many natives are super easy to grow, super beautiful, useful for food or medicine, and rewarding in addition to helping the threatened Hawaiian ecosystems.

You can also come on my monthly foraging walks where we eat only invasive plants that many consider weeds, but I’ll show you how to identify the native plants and how to make more room for them by eating the weeds! Next one is May 17th in Honolulu’s mesic forests.

04/05/2026

What if we revered plant breeders today the way we do with inventors and scientists like Einstein and Steve Jobs? Well back in the early 1900s, America lauded the great plant breeder Luther Burbank right along with other better remembered names from the times like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison!

The three met in Burbank’s Santa Rosa, CA garden in 1915 where the other inventors observed and praised Burbank’s development of over 800 new plant hybrids like a white blackberry still sold to this day called Snowbank, winter fava beans, European and American walnut crosses, spineless prickly pear, delicious plums, potatoes, and a beautiful quince tree, and he even hybridized strawberry and raspberry together.

That last one, even though they’re in the same Rosaceae family, was maybe a little too distant since it didn’t produce viable seeds like a mule so was hard to propagate. But hopefully our generation’s Luther Burbank will carry the torch and try again to make raspstrawberry with modern breeding techniques and an understanding of ploidy levels in different species.

Will that be you, the next great plant inventor?! Go visit Burbank’s beautiful garden the next time you’re in Northern California for inspiration and contemplate what fanciful plant creations you could bring into reality!

Come forage with me on O’ahu in a couple weeks and I’ll show you how this plant hybridization often happens on its own in the wild, sometimes for good effect, sometimes bad.

03/08/2026

Learn how you can eat the plants and not let the pests eat them all before you do!

With my 2 workshops coming up in the next couple weeks on O’ahu, first
Foraging Honolulu’s jungles on 3/15 where well learn to spot the edible, medicinal, fiber making, and toxic plants out in the wild near your home, culminating with a delicious wild salad we’ll all chip in on constructing, topped with amazing cacao nib dressing! Sign up here or in my bio:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/urban-foraging-in-honolulus-jungles-with-dr-nat-bletter-tickets-180705965407

Second we have the
Organic pest control workshop on 3/21 in Kaimuki where I’ll go over from my 20 years of gardening experience how to identify and control with easy organic solutions everything from the small buggers like mosquitoes, aphids, mites, mealy bugs, and avocado lace bug, to the big voracious buggers like snails, slugs, coconut rhinoceros beetle, and birds. You’ll go home confident you can defend your plants naturally and you’ll get to eat the fruits of your labor, not something else!
Sign up here or in the bio link:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/organic-plant-pest-control-workshop-tickets-1984035695173

See you at one or the other and let me know if you have any questions or things you’d like me to cover.

Happy foraging!

01/17/2026

Want to increase the diversity of plants you eat almost instantly?! We got 2 grey ways to do that in the coming 2 weekends with a foraging tour of Honolulu’s jungles this Sunday 1/18 and a Fruit & Flower Grafting workshop next Saturday 1/24 in Kaimuki.

This Sunday from 12-3 pm we’ll carouse around one of Honolulu’s wet forests and learn about all the delicious edible plants out there from the Chinese violet, sprouted coconut, and morning glory I mention in this video to sweetart tasting oxalis and endless garlicky Haole koa which well turn into a colorful salad topped with a rich cacao nib vinagrette. You’ll feel happy, healthy, and well satiated after learning how to enjoy all the forest’s spoils safely!
Sign up here or via the link in the bio:
Https://www.eventbrite.com/e/urban-foraging-in-honolulus-jungles-with-dr-nat-bletter-tickets-180705965407

Then next Saturday, we’ll host a plat grafting workshop to show you how you can turn say a not-so-tasty pomelo tree into a productive tree with 5 different citrus on each branch like calamansi, makrut lime, cara cara orange, tangerine, and yuzu lemon. Grafting helps get you a variety of fruit fast, in only 1-2 years, and you won’t be flooded by 100 lemons in one month as it spreads out the season to be more manageable. Dr. Leaves will show you all the techniques to make this seemingly complicated technique much easier from his nearly 30 years of grafting experience.

Register soon here since space is limited!
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/plant-grafting-workshop-tickets-1980543605238

Hope to see you at one of these events with all your plant questions for me!

01/11/2026

Derail the snails attack on your plants so you can eat them instead of the snails eating them!

Here are a couple simple organic, pet-safe techniques to keep the marauding slugs and snails from eating all your young plants before they have a chance to really thrive.

Wrapping cut up bottles or pots in 2” wide copper tape turns the slugs into batteries when they crawl across it and they get a little jolt that doesn’t kill them but makes them turn back. Copper mesh works even better since it doesn’t tear like the tape but if you use the tape, make sure it’s 2” or wider since the slugs & snails can hurdle the narrower tape that is more common.

You can also use as an additional safeguard a line of iron phosphate or sodium ferric EDTA pellets around the plants as well. The iron phosphate is a bit safer for pets and considered organic than the sodium ferric EDTA in Corry‘so I try to use one with just iron phosphate in it.

This redundant method of using both the copper tape and slug bait works pretty well as in the first 3 days I had these liliko’i plants unprotected, 14 leaves were demolished on the plants, but after I protected them, no leaves have been touched in over a week, in the same spot on the garden.

So if your seedlings are getting devoured by slugs and snails especially on food plants where you risk getting debilitating rat lungworm disease from ingesting a small slug, snail, or semislug. The only hard part is that you have to surround the plant completely with the copper and/or slug bait so they don’t have any access to the plants they find so tasty.

What kind of luck have you had with saving your plants from mollusk attack?

12/22/2025

The tuber the feeds the tropics– tapioca!

Or cassava, yuca, manioc, or Manihot esculenta by another name. Great for all your Hanuramakwanzmafestivusolstice celebrations, speaking of many names, same winter festival!

Cassava that’s native to the Amazon is an amazing tuber that feeds most of the tropics since it can grow in poor soil. When I plant just an 18” cutting in Hawai’i, I usually have 10-15 lbs of edible tubers when I harvest it about 10 months later, even without much care or fertilizing.

If the leaves look like the plant castor bean from which the toxic ricin is extracted, it’s because they are in the same family and share some toxins, with cassava having cyanide instead of ricin. But luckily cyanide or the cyanide producing compounds in cassava can be boiled off easily in about 15 minutes in the sweet type of cassava. Making it ready for frying up and the yucas fritas it makes are my favorite type of fries ever!

If you do have the bitter type of cassava that is grown in very poor soils, you do need to do a longer and more complicated cyanide extraction method to get it all out, that in the Amazon involves what look like giant Chinese finger prisons in which the ground cassava mixed with water is put in the woven tube and someone sits on a stick through one end of the of finger prison and this squeezed all the cyanide-laced water out of the cassava.

I’m making something much simpler for Hanukah dinner- cassava latkes with galanga and makrut lime leaves, inspired by delicious bergedel jagung corn fritters I had in Indonesia. Galanga has an anti depressant MAO inhibitor in it, so it adds to keeping us happy during these dark days of winter, just like all the lights are supposed to do in the various festivals of lights.

If you’re on O’ahu and want cassava cutting to grow your own latkes, let me know, so I can share this amazingly productive tropical tuber!

11/21/2025

Not just for hogs any more! One of my top 5 favorite fruits in the world! Jocote, caja, ciriguela, or Spondias mombin is native to Latin America but also understandable popular in the Philippines where it is known as siniguelas. Just don’t use the unappetizing and demeaning English name for it“hog plum”!

If you want to learn how to grow this and other delicious tropical fruit well in Hawai’i, come to my fruit tree management class this Sunday 12-3 at Waikiki Elementary school where can sign up at the link in my bio or here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fruit-tree-management-workshop-tickets-1962815586256?aff=oddtdtcreator

We’ll talk about how to plant, prune, fertilize, and protect fruit trees from pests so you can enjoy all the tasty fruit and have plenty to share with your friends and family.

And if I haven’t devoured them all, there might even be some frozen jocote to snack on during the class to beat the heat! This is one of my favorite ways to eat jocote since they have a sort of built-in antifreeze so come out of the freezer not hard, but a perfect sorbet consistency, ready for snacking on and cooking you off ASAP!

This is related to the local fruit wi apple (Spondias dulcis) which you may have seen more readily around Hawai’i. But Jocote will grow in most drier areas of Hawai’i from branch cuttings and everyone, please plant this since I only of 4-5 trees on O’ahu which is a crime for such an awesome fruit.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t grow from seeds, but trust me I’ve tried to plant every seed I’ve eaten! I believe we don’t have the male jocote tree here in Hawai’i so it doesn’t get pollinated properly, which happens with some other cultivated fruit like mangosteen.

But please plant this if you can. I’ll bring some cuttings to the fruit tree management workshop if you come. See you there with popsicles in hand!

11/05/2025

Know your fruits! Especially this delicious super productive but not widely grown tropical jaboticaba from Brazil.

They’re known as “jabos” in Hawai’i and they’re pretty easy to grow if you’re patient. But from a grafted tree in the sun they can fruit in only a few years from planting them.

And I have two events to learn all about them– first on my monthly foraging tour on 11/16, I’ll show you where to find jabos and tons of other tasty wild greens, fruits, and flowers in the forests of Honolulu, capped off with a delicious and beautiful foraged salad with my cacao nib vinagrette. Sign up here or at the link in the bio.
Https://www.eventbrite.com/e/urban-foraging-in-honolulus-jungles-with-dr-nat-bletter-tickets-180705965407?ref=estw

Then on 11/23, I have a fruit tree management workshop at Waikiki Elementary School where well discuss all the ways to make fruit trees like jabos thrive with good fertilization practices, organic pest management, proper pruning methods, and maybe even a little grafting and propagation. We’ll cover all kine fruit trees from citrus, mango, avo, coconut, lychee, to the exotics like mangosteen and grumichama, so bring your specific questions! You can sign up for here or the bio link:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1273465144548423

So 2 great events to learn about wild and not so wild fruit trees this month! Hope to see you at one, and let me know if you’ve tried jabos and have a favorite variety or species.

10/25/2025

At my favorite buffet of the year– the fruit tasting table at the Hilo meeting! How many fruit in this reel can you identify or have tasted? If you can get to 20 at least you can earn the fruit adventure badge.

There were several I’ve never seen or tasted despite having tried 410 species of fruit in my life.

We in HTFG are planning to break this out as a separate tropical fruit festival on O’ahu in the next year or two so you can taste all the amazing and rare fruit even if you’re not a farmer and don’t want to come for all the lectures on the minutiae of growing fruit. Would you travel to O’ahu in August to taste hundreds of delicious and rare fruit?

The only hard part about this fruit table is that they put it out on the first day and we don’t get to eat it all till the 3rd of the meeting so we have to sit through hours of talks smelling the potent aromas of marang, durian, mabolo, & cempadek and we can’t touch them. We won’t do that to you at the fruit festival!

10/16/2025

Hilo! Puna! Kapoho! East Hawai’i! I’m finally coming there next Tuesday 10/21 to lead a foraging tour around the Retreat Center!

Many of you have been asking me for years to come share the foraging love on Big Island, and through and Kalani’s help, it’s happening next week!

I used to live in Hilo a decade ago, so this a return to my old stomping grounds and we’ll explore all the great edible and medicinal plants I mention in this video and many more that we’ll find in the wilds of Puna, then after washing it all off super well, well enjoy a salad of delicious wild greens, reds, and purples with my notorious Obsidian Drizzle cacao nib vinagrette on top to put it all over the top.

Sign up with this link or the one in my bio, and we’ll see you there to all learn how to survive and thrive in wild Hawai’i!

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/puna-foraging-in-kapohos-jungles-with-dr-nat-bletter-tickets-1818464559449

Address

Honolulu, HI
96817

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Natty by Nature posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Natty by Nature:

Shortcuts

Share