Hey Gardening Noob 2 - [自给自足 种植法] How to transplant?

Frösche Tanzen

Am Bali hat Bobo mich ein Windspiel gekauft. Es hat viele Frösche, welchen in Wind tanzen. Goldig, genau?

Aber die Schnur mit dem großen frosche riss. So ich benutzt meine Leimpistole um die Schnur zu reparieren. Der Leim hat jetzt getrocknet, ich kann das Windspiel hängen.

My Service Balcony Garten

I bought these little hot pink and purple Bygel containers from Ikea. Only cost S$0.90 each and comes with drainage holes, which were a tad too big. So I had to line the bottoms with netting to stop the soil from coming out when I water the plants. Great for hanging off window ledges and grille.

I think I might buy more, I am a little disappointed they don't come in blue. But I did see white ones. 

Rare Sight - Flowers blooming at the same time

It's rare for the flowers in my planter to bloom at the same time. But what is bizarre is that there seems to be two camps of flowers. I think I will try to get another flower into the space. What was upsetting is that someone stole one of my S$2 Daiso wind vanes, that used to occupy the space. So lame.

Lantana, Blue Daze and dunno what is that yellow flower...

Sour Grapes II - Wreath Making

As mentioned earlier, I was going to make some wreaths using the grapevines from Mutters garten. Actually wreaths have a negative connotation in Singapore because the Chinese used to send wreaths to funerals (they have now evolved to floral arrangements). But I wanted to make some like the ones I bought from Salzburg and Munich. So first thing I did when I got home was to soak the vines in water to make them more pliable. I toyed with the idea of stripping the bark off first, but decided it was too difficult and I would do that after I had dried the wreath. 

Unwinding Mutter's wreath

Mutter had wound some of the vines so I had to unwind them to smaller, tighter shapes. I did not have enough vines to make big wreaths, and I didn't want to waste a lot of flowers on a bigger wreath. So in the end, I ended up with 4 wreaths. Should have wound two of them together to make a wider one.

Rewound wreaths

So I hung them up to dry for at least a month. I bought a glue gun from the neighborhood hardware shop (they sold them cheaper than Art Friends), and when Bär went to Bangkok recently, he asked me what did I want as a souvenir. I said I wanted cheap flowers.

Bär's flowers

The lovely guy got me some flowers (too bad they were not very good quality), and some balls to go on the wreath (I thought this was an excellent idea). I sat down last Saturday to try out my new glue gun. After practising on shoe repair, I started to try sticking the flowers on the wreath. I had scrapped off the dried bark off it beforehand. 

I wound white ribbon around the wreath and snipped off the flowers before sticking them onto the wreath

Because I had been repairing my shoe, I decided to sit crosslegged on the floor while putting everything on spread newspapers, instead of working at a table. I was almost halfway done, when I accidentally dripped some hot glue on my ankle. The heat was so intense, that I grabbed the tip of the gun with my left hand. WTF seriously. And then I scalded my thumb and fingers really badly. The joke was that the pain on my ankle wasn't that bad, and I wasn't even scalded there. But now I scalded my fingers so badly that boils appeared!!!

OUCH!

I started crying because the boils became very hot. I decided to burst the boils because the heat inside the boil was killing me. Don't do that, it will make the wound worse and cause infection. It's been seven days since, and my left middle finger is still very badly injured, and looks AWFUL. 

Completed wreath

It was nearly impossible to complete doing the wreath. I had been planning to make 4, in the end, I winced through finishing the one I was working on. The pain was so not worth the effort. Sigh...

Materials needed:
Glue gun
Newspapers
Ribbon (to wind around the wreath)
Dried/ Fake flowers

I finally got a caterpillar to morph...

Mr Bear was disgusted with my interest in caterpillars. He felt that I was being unnecessarily cruel to them because I kept trying to keep them. Actually I wanted to keep them so that they would morph into butterflies and pollinate my garden. It is a long flight to reach where I live. So far I have encountered some moths in my garden, and one giant butterfly (which was rather scary). While I rushed in to get my camera, it disappeared. Such a waste.

So far, I had 3 failures in rearing caterpillars. There were the two which I picked up from my new herb from the nursery. They were eaten by the cunning birds that live upstairs (they also have a very annoying taste for portulaca and enjoy lining their nests with my lime leaves). Then there was the one that fell on Bär's backpack. It died of starvation. It was then I realised that pennywort is inedible.

Two weeks ago, while coming back from a very trying meeting, I came across a caterpillar dangling from the roof of a shelter. So I picked it up, against the disgruntled shrieks of my team and carried it back to the Büro. This time I also remembered to pick up a leaf. 

The caterpillar ate around the leaf and "died" overnight. I forgot to bring it home to feed it sweet potato leaves. Well it just stopped moving the next day, even though there were still a lot of leaf left. I was like oops. Maybe it was thirsty (ok I am stupid), and dripped some water in. It started moving a bit. So I thought ok, let's bring it home. 

The cocoon after the moth has emerged

The next morning, I woke up to find the caterpillar inside a brown cocoon. I was ecstatic to say the least, because it was practically expediting my desire to have a pollinating butterfly. Well, what happened was that seven days later, during the worst of the haze, it emerged from its cocoon to reveal a moth...

Talk about anticlimatic. Oh well, I was glad I got to take a photo. After that, I wandered off to have dinner, sure that it would not be able to escape the apartment, because we had closed all the windows due to the haze. I was sure that it would pollinate the flowers in my balcony. 

The moth. Looks like one of the common species. Disappointing.

I hadn't seen it since. Hopefully it didn't get eaten by the lizards....