Laura and Lindsey at the Urban Farm talk about one of our favorite trees, our Moringa Tree.
This tree is a super food tree. It is high in calcium, protein, potassium. The whole tree is edible which is one of the reasons why we love it!
So the moringa tree is a superfood tree. It is high in calcium, protein, and potassium. The whole tree is edible, and we just love this tree for the beautiful landscape it creates. It’s a nice hedge plant and it self propagates. So the beans will fall and they’ll make lots of new trees. So you can start out with a few trees and you can eventually have a hedge like this!
The Moringa is known for its long yard, long beans. The end product is kind of like this, but as it begins, it’s a soft tender bean and it just slowly grows until it gets super long and thicker. At this point, the beans are too old to be able to eat and too tough to eat. But when the beans are younger, they’ll start off as a small little green bean, and then they slowly just start to lengthen. You can harvest them as they start to grow. And they’re about a foot and they’re not, they’re not firm like this. They’re bendable. So that’s the stage. You eat them. And here our tree, we have let some of the beans continue to grow and we’re doing this so that we can harvest the seeds because we get a lot of requests for the seeds. So once the bean is dry, we pick it and then you pop it open, like, so, and then you’ll expose the seeds.
Then these seeds are what we would use to grow more Moringa trees, or you can oil press them to make moringa seed oil.
So that is what we do with the seeds. And then the leaves you can harvest when they’re small and fresh, you can also harvest the flowers, which we don’t have any flowers on the tree right now. You can eat them raw and or you could put them in a salad or soups, or you can also drive individual leaves and blend them together to make Moringa powder and to use the Moringa powder. You can just take a teaspoon and mix it with yogurt or put it in with your smoothie. And you would’ve had just a whole serving of vitamin C and your antioxidants for the day.
So behind us, you can see that there are several different sizes of Moringa tree. This one, especially is the largest one. So this one was probably one of the first ones it’s over 10 years old, but you can see even some of the skinnier trees are still producing beans. So even if your tree is only a few years old, you’ll get production from it right away. So they’re a great tree. They grow with your property and they constantly provide you some source of food, whether it’s the leaves or the beans, the flowers. So it’s a really great tree to start out with. And it’s always producing some kind of edible crop. During this time in the season. In late summer, we start to harvest the dried pods. So we don’t want the ones that are still green, because the seeds are still hard to get out. They’re still a little bit more tender, but once they’re completely dry, they are ready for the seeds to be removed from the pods. So we’re just gonna be harvesting the dried seeds.
So now that we’ve collected some pods, let’s go on ahead and harvest them inside. We’re here to harvest the seeds. Just make sure you have some type of a container to catch the seas as they pop out of the seed pod.
And then once they’re completely dry, it’s very easy to open them. And then usually they just slide out, even from a small tree, you can still get plenty of pods to do whatever project you have in mind. So what we do with the seeds is we sell them or we use them to grow more Moringa trees. And then we also can oil press the seeds to make Moringa oil, which has a ton of wonderful cosmetic purposes because it’s high in antioxidants and rejuvenating properties.
We hope you enjoyed this video of us processing our moringa seeds. Please click to subscribe so you can watch future videos of us processing the marina leaves, and also the marina seeds for moringa oil, for our products.
