On Wednesday, I posted this photo of our evening meal the night before, which featured leftover chicken/vegetable soup I made the previous day, and Meda’s watercress, tomato, and avocado salad.
It drew this comment from an old friend.
Dwane Goodell
Interesting Trivia: There is a small, but excellent, green grocer in our neighborhood in Seattle, run by 1st generation Vietnamese. The first time I went in, after a thorough search, I approached the owner and ask if they had watercress. He regarded me for a moment, then asked, “Are you from Hawaii?”
That surprised me. Is this true? Is the watercress produced by Sumida Farm unique to Hawaii? I know we occasionally see some little miniature bunches of what Safeway says is watercress, and it looks nothing like ours.
I’m curious. What say you?
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At Laie Foodland, I purchased watercress that was grown in Maui. It had tender stems and packaged in plastic. Just this week I am finishing my hydroponic system where I am going to grow strawberries, lettuce, cilantro and in the last watercress and Kalo.
Would love to know your watercress grow system as with the others. Yes, Florida has incredible fruits and vegetables but the drive to farmers markets can take a while. There’s also something wonderful about growing your own goodies. Would appreciate your info. Aloha.
There is dryland watercress seeds, think from Fukuda Seeds. It doesn’t taste exactly the same and doesn’t become as green and large as wetland variety like Sumida’s.
TIMES also carries bagged watercress from Maui. Not as leafy as Sumida’s and the most recent bag I bought smelled a bit strange and I tossed it out. It was mostly stems with hard-to-detach leaves … sort of like that “island spinach.”
When visiting Sumida Farms, Mr Sumida explained the watercress grown stays in Hawaii with the nearby grocery stores getting first dibs on supply. The watercress is actually a English variety and requires lots of fresh flowing waters such as the springs of Kalauao.
Sumida is Definitely Different and oh so much better than any watercress I have ever seen in stores here… just one of the million things I miss about home.
Just happened to actually talk about watercress the other morning – it was in an almost empty backpacker’s hostel in the summer of 2017 in, of all places, central Dresden, Germany, a beautiful city carpet-bombed almost to annihilation at the last stages of World War Two. Finally a clump in one of the three free bunks wakes up and voila, we are engaged in a robust backpacker chat. The name “Honolulu” worked itself into the conversation. My new friend soon identifies himself as a member of the family that so fortunately owns the watercress farm makai of Pearl Ridge Shopping Center. I said, yeah, I had read the in-depth Advertiser article a few years earlier about you folks, and I wen’ grad Punahou. (We stay Dresden, a world away right then, keep in mind!) I love Anna Miller’s Coffee Shop next door, I say, and I ask if knew of the little-known off-island Anna Miller’s Coffee Shop in Minato-ku in Tokyo; small world shaka-laka! The Sumida watercress farms had been there all my life. It even turns out we both had served unassumingly in the US Army Reserve’s 807th Signal Battalion at Schofield Barracks in the steamy 1960s; it effectively was the eerily almost same as meeting a John Rambo DNA both ways, a la twin Sylvester Stallones!
to the fellow in Seattle,
I’m surprised there’s no fresh, tasty and locally grown watercress in Seattle. When my family and I lived nearby in Bremerton in the 1950-60s my Dad found a stream that had wild watercress growing. He would regularly harvest the watercress and I don’t recall it tasting any different than the watercress now in Honolulu. It was delicious!
When living in Costa Rica we would collect large amounts growing wild in the glades of Monteverde cloud forest.