Roselle crop

Tom starts with ...
In May I ordered Roselle seeds from Australian Seed www.australianseed.com). It was listed as a species I hadn't heard of before, Hibiscus subdantta; and I thought it might just be the same species which we grow up here along the Gulf of Mexico, H. sabdariffa, which we call Florida Cranberry or Karkadé. These Australian ones provided the largest calyxes we've ever had, though. Do y'all have the same experience down there - that H. subdantta is a different species with larger flowers and calyxes than H. sabdariffa? They otherwise look exactly alike. Here's a pic of this morning's pick.

By the way, I've had super results with all the seeds we've bought from the good folks at Australian Seed over the past two years. They and Ole Lantana Seeds and Phil@Tyalgum are my confederates in turning our little piece of Florida into a tiny bit of Oz far removed.

Pictures - Click to enlarge
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Tom says...
Thanks for the info, Phil. If I run across the "Arab" cultivar you're looking for, I'll let you know. I used to travel often to Cairo (it's where I got turned on to Hibiscus tea); and the brew there from the calyxes was substantially darker red than what I've been able to squeeze out of the ones we grow now. It was so deep red that it was nearly black; and it was sweet and lemony without anything added. I wonder if that was the "Arab" variety you're after?

By the way, since this is the first year that we've been able to compare H. subdantta to H. sabdariffa, I'm now beginning to accept, even a week after picking the subdantta, that they really are different species and not just two names for the same thing. There is a slight difference in color of the calyx which I hadn't noticed before, though the flowers look the same (just a bit different in size); and the tea from sabdariffa is darker to match the darker calyx. They taste the same.

Tom says...
Hi Pauline,
Do you still make the trip? Wish I still traveled there; but our work is done, and it's not likely we'll be back any time soon especially under the changing political circumstances.

We were always served hot tea, and I didn’t start making it cold till I started growing the plant in our own garden. I often watched our hosts' attendants prepare it and saw that they didn’t add sugar; they always left it up to us to add it (which bothered me since we were given a large communal sugar bowl with lumps of wet sugar and a sticky spoon - the same sticky spoon which had been in the bowl probably forever). Despite the spoon, I did always add sugar; but even without it, the tea had a slightly sweet, flowery, and somewhat tart taste. The stuff we make here from our own calyxes is the same, but we always add lots of sugar – same as for lemonade.

We make ice cream with them too; but we learned it's best to chop up the calyxes first before we cook them because the texture of a whole one in a mouthful is unusual - a bad texture experience since they remain sort of stringy.