Plants make great gifts, especially unusual ones like this one for my relatives and the fact I don't want to dig up the entire root ball of my currently ginormous Haight Ashbury ("3-4 ft tall," it said. My bum, it's over 6 ft now!)
So, I've been taking cuttings here and there of 1.5 ft tips of the branches and stripping the stems/leaves of the last 6 inches or so to instigate root making after I pop them into old beer bottles of water.
It'll take maybe a couple of weeks or more before they decide to root up, but it's worth it! I am so fearful it won't make it in the ground over winter even after a good mulching, so this is my insurance (crosses fingers).
When I had stripped the leaves/stems earlier, I let them fall to the ground thinking to just let them "go back to the earth," rot and all that.
As I was letting them fall and noticed the great pile that was building up around my feet I day dreamed about the yumminess of the leaves and versatility of the simple syrup I make from them and couldn't do it.
It would be like letting food rot on the vine or dumping down the trash.
I had to save the leaves!
So I rinsed them, threw them into a pot and added just enough water until it covered the leaves and put that range on HIGH. When things got boiling well enough I added sugar to taste so that the sweetness didn't overpower the Haight Ashbury citrus flavor but was thick enough to constitute a syrup and gave it a tasty-taste.
Mmmm, nothing like a scarlet spoonful of sugar to make the medicine of life go down, eh?
As it was still pretty much morning, I wasn't going to be making delicious gin hibiscus martinis (the vodka ones are ok too, but really, gin is better), so I broke out the sparkling water (still sparkling amazingly after weeks being open I've found) and made myself a little Hibiscus soda!
Beautiful (and refreshing)!
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