A walk in the Spice Garden

Kerala is know as The Land of God and The Land of Spices. In this post I am going to share my experience I had when I went to Thekkady, Kerala. Thekkady is considered a heaven for natural spices such as black pepper, cardamom, cinnamon and clove. I visited two spice gardens and I would share the combined experiences of both. When I was coming from Munnar to Thekkady I was huge plantation of black pepper and cardamom by the road sides.

Black Pepper

 

 

 

 

 Black pepper grows on the vine which takes support from the nearing tree and climbs on it. When the seeds are unripe they are green in colour, when riped the colour changes to red and when dried they turn black. The different stages of the pepper describes its color like green ,black, red ,white, organge and use.The green pepper is dried unripe fruit, black pepper is cooked and dried unripe seed, white pepper is dries ripe seed and the red pepper is ripe seed.

Perrermint Grass

 Peppermint grass is widely used in chewing gums and as mouth freshner.

A kind of potato that grows above ground

Jackfruit

Coco Tree with unripe fruits

 Coco seed are separated from the ripe fruit to make coco powder. It is favorite fruit of rats also. Once the fruit ripe rats climb up the tree to eat fruit.

Vanilla Stick

The mouthwatering vanilla essence is made from these vanilla sticks. These are processed at different temperature and go through a lot of processing before becoming vanilla flavor we eat.

Cinnamon tree with fruit

The fruits are used once dried. The bark of the tree trunk is peeled of and dried, it is the cinnamon stick.

Flowering tree

This flowering tree in common language is know as "yesterday,today,tomorrow" as the flowers on the tree changes their colour everyday.

Rose Apple

 Rose Apple is the common name of the fruit. It got its name from its appearance.

Flowering tree

The various shapes and sizes of green chillies-

Chilli round in shape

Chilli

 

Chilli

A big size Okra

Green Brinjal

Green Pineapple

Red Pineapple

Coffee beans

Cardamom plantation

Cardamom

Cardamon plantation requires humid weather and lot of water for its irrigation. Farmers usually have wells or water body near to their cardamom plantation so that it don't get spoiled due to lack of water. The green cardamom from the plant is dried up at high temperature before being used.