Carting this guy home - hibiscus

This pot of hibiscus was from the cutting given by our late neighbor from next door. He was a bachelor who loved to grow flowers and look after injured pigeons and mynahs (seriously don't understand the fascination with those winged pests). It was quite sad really, he and his parents watched me and my brother grow up. First his dad died from a fall, then he died from cancer, and in the end, his mother had dementia and was taken away to live somewhere else. The apartment fell empty for 7 years until his remaining siblings were able to legally sell it and distribute the proceedings.  Till today, I consider them as our neighbors, and those people who lived in the apartment since, transient families. 

My parents have started reducing the plants in their garden and so my mom passed this guy to me because he had stopped flowering. I slowly carted him home on this trolley. I think he is suffering more because he can only get filtered morning sun now, poor thing, though he hasn't kicked the bucket under my care yet.

Mutters Garden Sep 2014

I wanted to get mushrooms (the hydroponic farm near Mutter's garden also has a distribution and packaging arm), so when I heard that Mutter's friends were going to their allotment that Saturday, I immediately asked to hitch a ride there. The mushrooms are totally worth the trip, they cost like 30+ mushrooms for S$10, versus if you were to buy from the supermarket, you'd get about 8 for S$3.95. And I wanted to check out if the nursery was selling roses. I wanted to add more colors to my collection, now that I wasn't killing them out of inexperience (stupidity is another story).

Did I mention the kind hearted retiree uncles helped the ladies redo the entire garden layout?

After buying three pots of roses (the purple one was already not doing well, its lower leaves were turning yellow, but I never had purple roses before, so...), I walked back to the allotment and took some pics of the garden. The ladies were packing up some cuttings to bring to the new community garden. Saga on that later.

The solitary papaya.

Me yanking out the papaya tree

Lady C, our downstairs auntie, said that she wanted the papaya tree removed from "her" plot. So after harvesting the sole papaya from the tree, we yanked out the long suffering tree, and carried it to the end of the allotment, where it would dry up and become... I have no idea. Anyway it turned out later that it was Mutter who brought the papaya home. We ate it and it was wonderfully scrumptiously sweet. DELISH~! Quite a miracle, considering the women's sporadic watering (almost zilch, they depend on the water sprinkling system + weekly waterings, which meant their vegetables appear weed-like).

While chucking out the papaya tree, I caught sight of a slight movement among the "weeds". Crouching down, I saw this little guy. Uncle Toad!

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

Emergence of Edamame pods

I love to eat edamame so when Mutters friend grew them in their garten, I asked for some pods to start them off in my own garden.

I was given a few pods which I ate up... and had to ask for two more. As instructed, I sunned them really hard, before growing them. Only two succeeded, tiny twisty twiney things that climbed up my balcony and pole (in the L-shape).  One died later, after I forgot to water for days. That was very regrettable, because it started having flowers already, so it actually needed more water. I was set back for quite a while, because the one outside the apartment did not get as much sunlight so took a much longer time to climb and grow. 

And for a while, Mutter and I were debating over whether the pods were actually edamame or another plant which blue flowers were used for coloring in Peranakan cakes. Thankfully I was proven right, because finally the other plant started sprouting tiny pretty purple flowers.

Then I became worried and wondered if I needed to pollinate the damn things.

I am pleased to announce... I don't have to. This week I was very excited to discover that the edamame pods have finally started growing.

Now it's a question of when they become big enough to be harvested. I shall try very hard to restrain myself from eating them. Instead, I will use this harvest for seeds. Too bad edamame is an annual plant. Sigh. I think I will have to wait like bloody months again... before I can get a bumper crop from my new growth.

Sour Grapes

We went to play at Mutter's garten on Saturday. Her grapevine sprouted three grapes, same like last week she said. So she gave me the grapes. I went home to try the grapes. They were deadly SOUR!!

I didn't eat them but bit into them so that I can get the seeds for regrowth. I realized now that the grapes were not ripe. I am concentrating on grape growing because I like to eat grapes and I like that I can use grapevines to make wreaths, like the one I bought from Germany.

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.