Pink Lemonade

We all know the old saying about making lemonade with “lemons” – here in Puna we take that a step further, using the invasive guava trees to make “pink” lemonade.  You will sometimes see locals alongside the roads picking both pink and yellow guava – from the top heavy branches.  Only problem is that everything here tends to grow to t-a-l-l so fast, you can’t easily reach them. 

Believe it or not, our dogs LOVE the guavas – but then again, they also love carrots, bok choy and cabbage!  We have several guava trees along the driveway, so walking down to get the mail, it’s always a dash between me and the three corgi dogs to see who can get to the newly fallen ripe ones first.  I always let them have a few.

When we first moved in a couple years ago, I decided to try an experiment with one of the too-tall-trees and cut it off 12 inches from the ground to see what would happen.  Lucky me!  It has grown into a guava “bush” instead, only 5 feet tall with branches loaded with pink guava.  Now that I know that works, I’ll do the same with the rest of them.