Egging my seeds on

I bought dwarf and big sunflower seeds. So far, I have tried the big ones. All but 3 didn't succeed. And the the 3 that did? One died because of all the rain (not enough sunlight coming into the balcony). So when I tried the new batch, I planted them in egg shells.

Some marigold and one solitary sunflower seedling (keeping fingers crossed)

So far the egg shell one (you see the one in the foto? top right eggshell) is doing well despite my lousy transplanting skill. I cracked the egg shell, ok? So I was frantically trying to bury it, seedling and egg shell into the soil and hoping no one would see my mistake. Other than my portulaca with the tiny red flowers. I only have yellow chrysanthemums and am now raising sunflowers and marigolds (I am having better luck with them). I am toying with the idea of buying more plants from the nursery but I feel like it is kind of like cheating.

feathered perpetrator - "your <s>base</s> leaves are now belong to us"

This morning, I was on leave. Walking around the L-shape, I thought to myself that Mr Lime (the taller one) looks kind of miserable. I had thrown a green net on the two lime plants to dissuade the naughty black birds (we call them mynahs here) from plucking their leaves for their nests. However the strong wind accompanying the rain seemed to choke the poor things with the net despite my efforts.

So I decided to take the net off. Less than 10 minutes later, I came out of the apartment to see the bloody black birds doing window shopping at the lime plants. zzzzz.

Back went the net again. Sigh.

Butterfly on my Portulaca

I have two kinds of portulaca, I think one is grandiflora. I am not sure what is the other one which has small tiny flower petals. I will take a photo of that soon. I love portulaca and how it is so cute as to open its petals only for a few hours per day.

If you look closely at the photo, there is a butterfly or moth resting on one of the portulaca flowers.

Vater maintains that if the insect has its wings together, then it is probably a butterfly. Mr Bear thinks it is a moth. I don't care, as long as the damn thing pollinates the rest of my plants, which will take a miracle because I live so damn high up. I am almost tempted to have my own bee hive at one point (just kidding, I had a nasty bee bite when I was in Salzburg).

Anyway I will be running around the housing estates looking at different plants grown by high rise residents. I hope I don't get scolded. I am very interested to know what plants people have success in growing in Singapore, especially those living in high rise apartments. Say for example, last week, I forgot to take something from the apartment, and got off at the 13th floor. I saw an auntie planting two radish bodies into the soil. It is quite a funny sight because the radishes are only 1/3 in the soil. I asked her what she was doing, she said she is growing them for their leaves. Again, not understanding the fascination with white radish leaves...but it piqued my interest, high-rise gardening.

That *%#^ rain

You know that it's been raining like mad these few days. Because I try to water in the morning so that it has enough time to be absorbed by the plant (and avoid root rot), it is super difficult for me to gauge how much to water because I never know whether it is going to rain or how much is it going to rain that day.

So after almost drowning my container plants in the L-shape (killed one of my zinnias again), I decided to save water and let the rain help me water the plants. Just now my colleagues came with me to see my garten before a company event (held in my neighborhood), and I tell you it is bloody embarrassing because IT DID NOT RAIN TODAY. In fact, it was blazing hot.

You could see the plants were visibly parched, because the last time they had water was yesterday afternoon... *ashamed*  Even my aloe vera flower looked like it was going to up lorry. 

"I am so sorry baby, I will water you..." I rushed back after the event to water them. And then it rained.... WTF.

Mutters Garten III

I always like posting fotos of my Mutters garten, because it is an ever evolving mash-up of vegetables and other edibles. Vater likes to call them weeds, because Mutter and friends only go there once a week, and the poor plants have to fend for themselves for the rest of the week. So they often don't get enough water as the default sprinkler system provided by the landlord is pretty CRAP, and grow up spindly and defeated. Makes an interesting mouthful, I'd tell you.

Anyway, you can check out the first and second series if you are interested. This is the third series. I only got one of her garten because it was the weekend that we were going to the nursery to buy plants for Chinese New Year.

This year Mutter's Mr Banana plant is doing really well and has even sprouted some bananas (damn still not the kind I like to eat). She also has a lot of chilli plants, parsley and giant hearts of chicory. Yucks. I hate chicory and it is the one vegetable Mutter has great success with.

Mutter's garten looks hokey pokey as usual because they have three aunties who have different and pretty wild ideas about what is good to grow. Contrast that with that of their retired teacher friend who comes everyday to look after his babies and has three plots (one is even used to grow water lilies *faint*).

The people at the rented gartens usually grow the vegetables for their own consumption, except for one family which operate a market garden out of their four beautifully attended plots. Every Saturday without fail, they will come as a group to harvest the vegetables. The neighbors sometimes buy the organic vegetables from one another especially those who are recovering from cancer (it is quite alarming how many people we know who have had tumors/cancers). Just that weekend I was there, the retired teacher's wife came around again to buy the white radish leaves for her friend's daughter who is recovering from brain tumor removal operation. Not sure about the benefits of radish leaves, perhaps it is a placebo to reassure the worried mother. But when I was in Taipei, we ate noodles made with the crushed sap from white radish leaves.

Michelstadt Blumen

I once talked about how if I could choose a place to live, I would want to live in Michelstadt, Deutschland. I love this beautiful town's old buildings, and am in awe of all the effort taken to keep them looking so lovely all these years.

This is a great way to hold your container plants if you don't have a garden!

Anyway I neglected to mention the great Frühstück we had Cafe Siefert (which also has some lovely flowering plants at their outdoor al fresco area), but that's another story which I will talk another day. What I want to mention today were the pretty flowers we saw as we were walking back to the carpark.

I was naughty and reached into someone's garden when Onkel und Tante H und B1 were walking ahead of me, to take this foto of this lovely Camellia Japonica. In a neighbor's garten, I saw white soldiers with hearts of yellow standing at attention together.

Then I saw the little dandelion waving bravely at the wind near the fence, while trellises of green bean promised a decent harvest.

Finally a flower from my edamame

Patience isn't really my thing. I have been very upset that my mom's edamame plants have grown pods and died and my 3 haven't even sprouted flowers. Just loads of leaves. 

Check out the purple flower!!!

Then I saw this little side sprouts that look suspiciously like new leaves (argh) or flower buds. I was holding out against hope that it was a flower bud because  I can't eat the bloody leaves *damnit*. 

Anyway it turns out they were flowers. phew. I am pretty excited, at this point, even if it doesn't translate into flowers I will still be happy.

Just now I went home for dinner. As I was walking out, I look up into Mutter's nightmarish container garden (I will take a photo. I don't mean the one she rents). I was like wtf, that whole mass of green that I have been ignoring was actually all edamame with loads of purple flowers. Some people just have green fingers I guess.

Also note to self: I shouldn't tie my plants so tightly to the stake. Yesterday, grumbling, I was trying to scrape off white fly larvae from my edamame (I have 3) and the poor top snapped off. I thought I was going to have a coronary there and then.

I harvested my spring onions

I soaked the white stems of the spring onions I bought exactly three weeks back, after cutting off the green parts for making kimchi.

So three weeks on, the spring onions have sprouted new green stalks like mad. However due to lack of nutrients, the stalks are spindly and thin. I decided to harvest them all at one go for spring onion pajeon and to garnish my samgyetang. 

Here are my spring onions in full glory on my cutting board.

Looks like a sickly cousin to the original harvest. But what do you expect with just water and sunlight?

You don't see the white stems in this foto because I am restarting them again. This time, I am soaking half of them in water, the other half in water mixed with liquid fertilizer. I had to throw one root out though, because it was starting to rot. I was telling Mr Bear that in the original source for the article, it did say that we could only get like 3-4 regrowths for each white stem.

I thought it was because the white stems would rot from too much water. But Mr Bear deduced that it was because eventually the spring onions will run out of nutrients because they are essentially grown in water now. Which is why this experiment...

Read on for the spring onion pajeon story.

B1 thinks that the spring onions are my most successful plants (I guess so, after I managed to not grow a single potato despite the healthy looking plant, but that was a mistake which I have learnt from). He said unlike my tomatoes, which have grown a miserable 4 (after that awful exodus-like blossom drop), this was at least sufficient for our needs. He said I should give up growing my edible garden because it was much easier to buy our food and the struggles with the white flies are totally not worth the trouble. *roll eyes*