Gardening has been a nightmare

The past few months have been a nightmare for my garden. Firstly there was the haze, which stretched three months from Sep to Nov, then the welcomed monsoon season, which wrecked the community garden yesterday.

Luckily Mutter and I have the L-shaped drain which the rest of the gardeners filled in. So after the rain stopped, the water drained away quickly for our plot at least. I think it is time to discuss with Mutter how to further reinforce the border beside the drain. Initially we grew portulaca, but that unfortunately died from the combined effects of haze plus monsoon rain.

The only plus side of yesterday's rain was all the snails on my plot drowned. They have been a major pain since the rain started, eating and climbing my stakes to get at my malabar spinach.

Jicama 沙葛 harvest

Ever since our move to our new location in the community garden, I planted these jicama seeds for nearly 8 months! 

 I kept hesitating to harvest them because I was worried that there would be nothing edible to collect therefore the long wait. By the way for jicama, only the root is edible, everything else is inedible, even the seeds and leaves. Which meant the plant was a pain to get rid of by the time it came to harvest. 

So I harvested one for myself, left one for my mother (she was very fortunate to find two buried in the same vein), and gave the rest to the old folks to the garden, who split each jicama into two because they were very big.

Next time i will grow #jicama for only 6 months instead of waiting nearly 8 months. Had some monster sized ones, my mom weighed one. Was 2 kg! #gardeningsingapore #allotment #gardening

A photo posted by Gardening Duckie (@meinkleingarten) on Nov 7, 2015 at 2:07am PST

Mutter weighed the bigger jicama she got and it was at least 2 kg, she said.

Well, the plant was useful on sunny days where it provided shade. But other than that, it might be too much effort to grow. Now that I had relative success, the old people wanted to attempt as well, taking the seed pods off me. Well, they are welcome to them as I won't be growing them for the next three months with the monsoon season coming.

How tall the plant was:

We often call Bang kuang (also known as 沙葛) as turnip. But after some failed attempts at Googling "turnip" (because the old folks at the #communitygarden wanted to know if its pretty purple flowers and recently emerging seed pods are edible), I found out that its English name is #Jicama. And it turned out that other than the edible tuber, everything else on the jicama plant is poisonous, esp the seeds which contain rotenone. I had to spend my evening cutting down the pods as they take away the plant resources, thus impacting the tuber size... 🐈 Anyway the super yummy tuber is great in stews, salads, braises and is most famous as the filling in #popiah.

A photo posted by Gardening Duckie (@meinkleingarten) on Jul 7, 2015 at 9:26am PDT

Aloe Vera

Seriously, if anyone wants aloe vera, come get from me. I have aloe veras coming out of my ears, and that is even after I haven't watered them for months. Damn things.

When I saw people selling aloe veras at the pasar malam (night market), I was like, don't waste your S$7, I can give you...

[Backdated Post] Birthday Present from English Bloke

Like I was saying on Instagram, English Bloke included this cute sign and solar lights in my birthday parcel this year. They are really pretty when the lights at the community garden go out at 10pm but the metallic parts have sadly turned rusty from being hit by the rain. Nonetheless they serve their purpose, and with the recent blow-out of the overhead lights, they + some stand-alone solar lights from Daiso offered a comforting glow when I had to water my plants with the aid of my phone's torch light. 

In fact it has now become my most recent obsession to get even more solar lights to make the garden all glowy and pretty at night :))) I am also replacing the National Day flags with ordinary flags to up my garden's aesthetic.

This cute sign + solar lights were part of the birthday parcel #Englishbloke got me this year. I strung the lights as soon as I opened the parcel. It was so massively sweet of him to get me this after I was grousing to him that I couldn't buy the lovely solar bird lights that #IKEA was selling last year. These lights were super comforting when the community garden lights stopped working later in the month. #birthdaypresent #friend #reddit #gardening #allotment #new #followme #communitygarden #singapore

A photo posted by Gardening Duckie (@meinkleingarten) on Sep 6, 2015 at 10:01pm PDT

The (NSFW) Anatomically Correct Cactus: The Dick Pic

Our collective jaws touched the ground when we saw this weird ass cactus at Flower Dome (Gardens by the Bay)!!! We had to queue behind a tourist who.... snapped his hand hovering near the cactus as if simulating a HJ. When he turned his head and realized that we were right behind him, he laughed embarrassed as if we all shared a secret joke. Ewww.

Bobo said drily, "...as if we gave a shit that he is gay."

After capturing this naughty cactus with my phone.... I was infected with an equally naughty idea.

I whatsapped Miss Bear if she ever received a dick pic from anyone.

She replied, "of course not!"

Naturally it was an invitation for me to send this to her. LOL. So I did.

This week in Instagram 1: Long Beans

I realized I made a mistake while planting long beans when the plant started sprouting long windy vines.

"Oh crap," I told my mother. "I planted the wrong variety of long beans (that I bought the seeds from Ban Lee Huat and planted once before with 0 success)."

I told her that I wanted to yank out the plants but she said it would be a waste of life. So I thought about about it, and we did the cornrow (sp?) method using some canes I bought at World Farm. This time I also made sure to snip as many leaves as I could to ensure air circulation and prevent fungal diseases. I find that long bean plants are very susceptible to fungal diseases, aren't they?

So anyway after all that snipping, I still encountered fungal disease, due to my watering the plants only late at night when I come home and also, I have a bad habit of hosing plants like I am washing a car instead of pointing the hose to the ground and avoiding the foliage. Despite that, I finally managed to harvest some long beans, and I find the taste of the reddish brown long beans much more palatable than the green long beans. Anyway with all that snipping, I cannot help but feel that long beans are very high maintenance, as compared to eggplant.

I notice of course, the old lady, Auntie M, leaves her fungi-infected leaves alone and was still able to correct decent amount of beans. Then again, with the amount of fertilizer she dumped in (I did not fertilize my beans as much)...

2 red #longbeans dangling on the stems. #allotment #communitygarden #singavore #gardening #gardeningsingapore

A photo posted by Gardening Duckie (@meinkleingarten) on Aug 10, 2015 at 7:55am PDT

My plot at the community garden

Three months in, this is my little garden. I am now experimenting with a PVC pipe to make a vertical planter of sorts. Because we all remain land greedy. Just ask the older folks, who have cannibalized some of the remaining plots. For this planting cycle, we are growing kangkong, spinach, a little 小白菜 , jicama (still growing from the previous cycle), eggplant, okra (suffering from some form of fungi), cucumber, bittergourds and longbeans. + some herbs.

#basil in the foreground of our little #plot at the #communitygarden. The plot is tinny tiny, isn't it? #gardeningsingapore

A photo posted by Gardening Duckie (@meinkleingarten) on Jul 29, 2015 at 1:45am PDT