Today I planted a dwarf Samoan coconut near the entrance of the driveway. It’s on the opposite side of the Malayan coconut I planted the other day. The vision is to have two short coconut palms greet you as you arrive. When fully mature one palm can produce over a hundred coconuts per year. The nuts have many uses depending on which stage they are in.
When the nuts are about 6 months old, these are the ones filled with lots of water. With the right tool they are fairly easy to poke open and have a little bit of jelly like meat you can scrape out with a spoon. A
9 month old fully developed coconut will still have a lot of water in them but you need a machete or something sharp to open it. The meat at this stage is called rubber meat. It’s kind of flimsy but tastes good.
When the coconut is more than a year old they turn brown and dried looking and it might already be on the ground. When you shake it you can hear some water sloshing around which means that there is less water but is full of thick coconut meat that tastes rich and fatty. It takes way more effort to open these but you can make coconut milk, ice cream, chips, flakes, and more.
The most magical final form is when the coconut sprouts. The inside of the coconut turns into a fluffy coconut cotton candy like substance. I only tried it once at Ilana’s place and it blew my mind.
Originally posted on 2021-09-01, part of the daily planting journal behind Ha’a Chocolate’s food forest on Hawai’i Island.