Regrowing plant from scraps :Tou Myou

I got this TouMyou/bean sprout from Donki not long ago. So after cutting the sprouts for dinner, I thought maybe I should just put it in a container to see if it will regrow again. 

Voila! It grew! So that rm5.90 I can have 2 rounds of sprouts (or maybe more rounds maybe?).

Video: Sunflower Day To Day

Finally after many round of trying to plant sunflower, I did it! From 5 seeds, 2 germinated and finally one made it with many sunflowers now. Been taking pics of the sunflowers everyday since it started to bloom till the day it withered. At first the sunflower seeds rot cos of the rain but I manage to harvest seeds from the 2nd flower. It' s just amazing to see it change everyday, at least for a crazy gardener like me.

 

Simple watering system for your garden

One thing that really makes me worry is not able to water my plants when I'm out, especially when I travel. So after some trial and error, finally I'm able to construct a simple watering system for my mini veg garden. You need a watering timer like this.

It's about rm120-rm150.

P/S: it comes with a cover, to block water from going in. Remember to close the cover otherwise your timer will be soaked in water and it's a total lost.

And you need a few other tools, which I will mention in the video.

I did this for my gardening page right before i left for my Sydney trip.

There are many places that you can buy the tools, some imported so its more expensive and if you're like me who likes to save $ you can try buying from Formeniaga. I heard they're having year end sale now.

Okay some ppl asked me why not just install the 360degree sprinkler that we use for grass. You can use that, however I have a few reasons:

1. you only water the pots that you want to water. No water wastage and you don't encourage weeds growth.

2. some plants like pumpkin leaves, the leaves will have powdery mildew if the leaves touches water when it's hot. So watering the soil is better.

I hope you find the infos and video here useful.

Happy Gardening!

Growing pumpkins

My aim this year is to be able to plant And get at least ONE pumpkin. You know what? I got 6. *lol* it was a mental moment for me cos the plant grew wild, covered the entire veggie garden area, there was hardly any sun shining the plants underneath it (cos I elevated the plant 7 ft off the ground) , alot of mosquito, and the worst was when female flowers appearing without male and I went hunting around looking for make flowers *LOL* those were the funniest moment I had while growing pumpkins for almost 7 months.

Left: male flower

Right: female flower. Notice that female has a fruit attached

How to pollinate? Use a brush and brush the pollen in the middle of the male flower and then brush it into the middle of the female flower. Make sure you brush in enough supply of pollen , otherwise your pumpkin will not make it and it will either appear like a deflated pumpkin or just rot and falls off . From my experience Only the flower that bloom on the same day can be use to pollinate. 

Once pollinated successfully you can know it the next day cos the fruit will grow alot. 

See how it transformed in just a couple of  weeks. Amazing. 

And then more and more flowers appear and I was busy running around doing the pollination work cos I had to net my flowers due to the existence of fruit fly. If there wasn't any fruit flies, the bees and ants will be able to the do the pollination for me. 

these are the baby pumpkins few days after pollination. 

and the baby grew! My first hand pollinated pumpkin. 

The biggest , the one that I had to give to my mum, just because she called me a plant murderer. She changed her mind now, I hope :P

And these were the 6 big babies that I have harvested. See that the stems are not short, it is advisable to cut it further away from the fruit cos the stem will slowly dries off, while it dries, it will bring virus and will cause the fruit to rot.  Leave the fruit at least 2 weeks before you consume it. Cos the glucose is building in there and making the pumpkin extra sweet!

One picture for the record, cos I am never going to grow pumpkins in my garden anymore.

Unless it's a baby pumpkin, or a non creeping one. hehe

I had 6 and gave away 5 to my mum, my 2 sisters in law, my ex neighbour and my 2nd sister.
And here was the first pumpkin that I have hand pollinated and left untouched for a month.

Mission accomplished. One Target Achieved for this year! :D

Anyone can compost!

Read an article today in TheStar and they say that composting has come to a dead end as people are just not interested (and lazy) to compost kitchen waste and we have problem with place to store our rubbish. It's not that I'm a gardener and I'm saying this, but what is so hard? Seriously? You just need a bucket or container with holes underneath, add some soil, throw in the kitchen waste (uncooked veg, fruit peel, egg shells, fish waste, and like me... Fruits and veg that got spoilt because I totally forgot about them in the fridge, hehe) and top up with some soil.

Once in a while use a garden fork (or wood, or anything) to turn them. And not long after that you can get dark, rich soil for your garden. Seriously, it is not hard!!!

If everyone were to do abit, we can all help the environment, minimize waste, and also save money (no need to buy fertilizer maaaa)

Just remember to cover it well so that flies can't get in, cats won't go poop in it and also rats won't go dig it ya. 

Today's Harvest

Trial and error

Every time I look out to my garden, I feel like a looser, there is nothing to harvest. Then as I was scrolling my phone, I realize that I harvested quite a lot of veg from my looser garden. So I did a compilation and to my surprise I really did planted quite a lot of veg in my garden. without realizing it, I have gone a long way this year. I learnt about gardening and also my life as a mother of an Aspie. Many trial and errors, but I'm not giving up. Gambateh Sasha!! 

Top left: My first radish

Top right: Japanese cucumber & mini cucumber

Bottom left: cherry  tomatoes

Bottom right: onions.

Top : Corn that was almost all pollinated, bottom left: baby corns

Bottom right: mini cucumbers, okras, roselles and Thai lemon.

Top left: Okras

Top right: failed beet root and carrot

Bottom left: Mugworth & okra&mint&lemon 

bottom right: okras and chilly

Top left: Cabbage

Top right : mulberries

Bottom left: okras 

bottom right: failed orange and purple carrots

Top left: Spag squash & kuchai & roselle& limau nipis

Top right: Okras & Thai lemon & endamame & kacang sepat & roselle

Bottom left : Kacang sepat 

Bottom right: Mustard 

Lastly left: spinach for Neighbour and right: snow dragon brinjals for grandma 

Confession of a Shopaholic Gardener

Hello.
My name is Sasha Tan.
And I have a confession.
I am a shopaholic.
Not any kind.
I am a Shopaholic Gardener.
I go shopping for plants almost every week.
Even if I don't buy any, I will go and just stand there and look at plants.
I guess that is my therapy.It takes my stress away (yeahlah.......... any excuse will do right?)
And when I get notification from KebunBahagiaBersama, I will click and read and then my hands itch. But I will "tahan".....and tahan......and tahan... until I have a few seeds in mind then I will order from her. And its worst when you pay yesterday, and you get it the next day!

And you know, the owner is so nice? when you buy 2, you get one free pokok Ketup-Ketup

and even free Petai , plucked fresh from their own Petai tree. 

You see how they make me keep coming back?

But it's okay. I tahan... and tahan samo....till next time... i tahan..

Brinjal

I used to have one brinjal plant given by the nursery lady but it didn't survive. And then I restarted growing some with seeds. And I waited so long for it to grow cos it was stunted. And finally I have my first brinjal grown from seed. A Terung Giant Naga Putih. Was attacked by aphids but I manage to save it using Neem Oil (you can buy from Indian Sundry Shop) + Dishwashing Liquid + Water. Still waiting to harvest it :P

And then my other brinjal plant bought from Pasar Tani Kelana Jaya grew and gave me a fruit. This was the growing process from day to day. Amazing isn't it? 

And to my surprise, I got another brinjal grew out of nowhere.

 And it's flowering now. Brinjal plant has both male and female reproductive organs in the same flower. So if there is a helpful insect rumming around that particular flower, then I will be lucky to get brinjals. :)

Making own compost pipe bin

I used to go around digging holes to bury my kitchen scrap. And most if the time it's hard cos I don't have a big veg patch and I have plants all over the raised bed. And then I came across a pic in Pinterest and they mentioned about this composting pipe bin. How awesome! And I have so many leftover pipes from my house renovation and I went to the hardware store to buy the pipe cover (Pinterest suggest we use pot to cover the pipe) but I think it's much neater like this :)

Just drill some holes around it so that worms have access to the scraps in the ground.

Remove all the soil in the pipe and bury them deep covering all the worm holes. Cover the pipe with a cover ( you can use an overturn pot) but I use a proper pipe cover bought from hardware store.

I made a slightly taller one here. You can keep adding kitchen scrap into the pipes. Don't forget to cover it otherwise you will have maggots crawling around.

So now I have pipes all over my raised bed, and I can just keep adding new scrap into the pipes. My worms are fed, and I don't have to collect the poop and pee, it goes direct to my plants. Save my time!

Growing tomatoes

One of the plant that I really want to grow is tomato. Why? Cos Jayden eat tomato for fun and also cos when it's ripe, it turns red and it's so pretty ^_^

Anyway, I started growing tomato by just throwing some seeds from locally bought store into the soil. And all of them grew. And it was accidental cos the tomatoes rot and i just threw them to the soil for compost.

Taken on 31st October 2012.

Then I selected a few and grow them in pots and the rest i just throw them into my compost soil.

To my surprise, 3 plants grow so well in the compost soil and the one I planted in pots was stunted cos I kept moving them in and out of the rain and sun.

But I just let them grow and grow and it became so tall.

Then I noticed that i have 2 kinda of tomatoes in my harden. The one above is the fat tomato. And the one on my raised beds are cherry tomato. All came from the same box of "cherry tomato".

Is it hard to plant a tomato plant?

Need alot of time?

Alot of space?

That's people's FAQ to me about tomatoes.

I will answer, depends on whether you have the passion or not.

And also I don't spend much time in my garden cos I need to tend to my kids.

But one tip is , you gotto watch out for "suckers"

Suckers grow in between the main branch and the stem. You can just simply pluck it off when its tender or you can leave it grow bigger and then cut it off and just poke into the soil to get another tomato plant. Cool right?

I started to hand pollinate the tomato flowers using brush. I only manage to get ONE tomato.

Then a fellow Green Nook member said that she used electric toothbrush to vibrate her tomato flowers and her whole plant was filled with tomatoes. So I did the same to mine.

We're not crazy okay. The reason why people use electric toothbrush is because the vibration mimics the movement of bee's wings. And so that when its vibrated the pollen from the male will drop to the female's flower and voila! It's pollinated.

Surprisingly after the vibration session, more and more fruits appear on my tree.

And the ones on my raised bed grew even taller, than me!

Oh i got so excited I started to water my tomato kau kau and this was what happened.

KABOOM!

Too much watering in a day can cause yr tomato to get too much water and explode.

And I harvested this too late. *sigh*

And then these are the cherry tomatoes. I think JD is enjoying his cherry tomatoes in school recess now.

With more to come! Here's a video of cherry tomato plant.

If you want to start planting something, tomatoes might be the right plant for you.

Cos its easy and anyone can do it.

Remember, it's all about whether you have the passion or not ;)

Harvesting Japanese cucumber

Remember my update on my japanese cucumber plant back on 29th December 2012?

My japanese cucumber back then in 29 December 2012.

Suddenly it started to grow and flower so much. When the flowers appear, especially when the female flowers appear, its time to get busy.

Usually helpful insects will help to pollinate the male and female flowers. But in my case, my garden is pretty new so there is not much flower to attract the right helpful insects to help pollinate the cucumber. So what you need to do is, hand pollinate them. There are 2 ways to do it. As soon as you see a female flower ( a flower with tiny cucumber at the back), you need to watch out for the flower to bloom so you can hand pollinate them.

Find a male flower. Male flowers only have flower and no baby cucumbers at the back.

Remove the petal and leave only the middle part of the flower.

And you just flick the middle part of the flower into the female flower. Make sure that the middle part of the flower touches each other.

Or you may use a brush to brush the middle part of the male flower.

This is a female flower. And after you brushed the male, you need to quickly brush the female flower to  pollinate them. And you need to do this a few times (few days) as long as the flower blooms. So how do you know if its successful or not?

See that the cucumber is dying? It's a sign of failed hand pollinated jap cucumber. 

And this is how a successful hand pollinated jap cucumber looks like.

this was in 3 days time (left : 12/1/2012, and right 15/1/2013) I covered the jap cucumber with netting that I got from my grocery shopping cos I don't wanna let the cucumber beetle to destroy my precious cucumber. How do they look like?

Like this. And one of them, can cause ALOT of harm. No joke.

There is no pesticide to kill them except your hands. Squash them as you see otherwise you can kiss your cucumber and squash goodbye.

And this was today, 4 days after the pic (15/1/2012)

Check it out!

And this is me with my first ever Japanese cucumber grown in my house.

I showed the above pic to my JD who was upstairs at that time and he said "WOW!!!" and quickly ran down to see it with his own eyes. I said "do you wanna help me harvest it?  let me get a scissors" And he ran back into the house and came back with his own scissors (with his name on it). It's a joy seeing him getting so excited to help me harvest this jap cucumber. Gardening is not only my source of therapy, but its also a teaching ground for me, where I share with my kids on how to grow things, what to do and what not to do. Not sure if any of my teaching goes into their system but at least they know that we can grow food although we stay in a city with limited space and I'm no expert in gardening.

Nothing is impossible :)

So here's my 2nd harvesting video. Don't curse me cos I accidentally took it sideways and distorted the whole video. *lol* I'll learn from my mistake!  Well at least the first 2 pics and last 3 pics are fine :P