Gone Fishing

It always makes me happy to see seedlings and young shoots. Even on bad days. Or, perhaps especially on bad days since green kind of makes the day a little brighter. 

Sis got me a mother leaf with an exquisite terrarium accessory; an angler in a boat! I have been buying terrarium accessories online, and most of them aren't as detailed in their craft, but of course, since I don't really pay a lot for them, I can't expect a lot too. 

This little piece that Sis got for me is definitely of a higher quality, with a little boat made of a wood-like material (it feels just like wood, perhaps it is wood) and an uncle with a beefy chest! The piece is made in Germany by Preiser and hand-painted in Mauritius. 

Check out the "angler in a boat" on Amazon!

Since I intend to let the Mother Leaf sprout, Sis suggested a fishing-setup. This is very different from my usual soil-based terrarium, and it looks extremely zen on my work table! It's simple and elegant; an easy distraction from work. Till I get a tiny enough pole to put it into his hands, the angler really has to make do with just enjoying the water and breeze!

Sis bought two pieces of Mother Leaf. I left the other piece on the bookshelf where there's more light. More shoots are sprouting than the leaf on my table. We are guessing more will shoots will sprout since the lighting is stronger. 

Terrarium seems to be in trend again suddenly. And, I truly hope the trend continues and goes beyond what we have seen in the past. There has not been much advancement in terms of the accessories and set-up ideas. 

I also bought a few pots of succulents and HAPPY PLANTS! 

Happy plants are supposedly the little black seeds in dragon fruits. They would eventually grow to be full grown plants after a few years if given the right condition, according to the vendor. 

After three weeks, and not dying on me, I decided it was time to re-pot the happy plants. Sis commented it was cute, so it was "adopted" as soon as it was made!

Nothing very fanciful, but the bathtub container kind of liven up the look. Ladybird has never failed me so far. They are good in almost any situation that calls for a little touch-up, not too overwhelming but it brings a touch of colour. Red just so happens to match nicely with green, always. 

The bathtub is now happily sitting on Sis's work desk. I read reports that happy plants are able to absorb radiation emitted by the computer. Not sure how true this is, though. If it truly works, I guess they should be all over Japan?   

And, the kale seeds that I bought during the Gardeners' Day Out is finally sprouting! 

The seeds germinated 2 days after they were planted. I planted 5 seeds, and 4 germinated! That's a pretty good success rate!

Check out the kale seeds available on Amazon!

Kale seems to thrive better in slightly acidic soil, with pH not exceeding 6.8. Therefore, coffee grounds should be a good booster since its pH is around there. I am now using the coffee grounds that my family throws out after their morning coffee. Nothing like blue mountain, just the normal local coffee. 

I am quite excited to see how the kale would turn out. If my setup works, there would definitely be more veggie projects coming up!

From Our Porch

Watching the guppies in the mini-water garden has became a habit.

Once in the morning, once in the afternoon, once just before dinner and the last time before bed. Sort of like tucking them in, haha!

My favourite is the morning slot. When the light is good, and the sun still gentle. 

One morning, as I squatted and fed the guppies, I saw a tiny brown speck that was moving. 

It was a water snail. 

It had been a while since I saw one. I like the colour and lighting, so I hooked on the macro lens to the iphone for a closer shoot. 

Halfway, amazingly, the water snail made an impressive effort to float towards the nearest fish feed and attached itself onto it, and started nibbling away!

I had to bring the iphone just about a centimetre from the snail to get the below shoots. All the while, I kept reminding myself to hold on tight to the phone or it could end up being a permanent fixture in the water tank...

We have our doubts about allowing the snail to stay in the water garden. 

It is an interesting addition to just the fishes. And it does help with the algae. So instead of hauling it out now, we are keeping our eyes close. 

For now; that is. 

Gardening Ideas!

I am so hooked on Pinterest recently; I am prowling through it constantly. Especially on the gardening board. 

There are just so many darned good ideas that I am itching to try! 

First of all, a string garden. 

source: http://www.culturewick.com/2012/03/string-gardens.html

This would act so well as a curtain for the backyard; which is one of my favourite spots in the house. A string garden would look perfect since the awning's structure provides ready structure to anchor the string. 

Second - terrarium. I fell hopelessly in love with terrarium only from end of last year after a LA trip. Little glass bubbles of terrarium; I never thought I would find something else more beautiful than that. 

It looks easy to assemble the tiny garden, but gosh... easy is so far away from that innocent look. Lots of patience and trials. But it is totally worth it.

Third - a herb garden. A vertical one. This might go in the backyard too? Easily within reach when I cook :)

source: http://homemade-modern.com/ep29-hanging-garden/

Plenty of sunlight, partially shaded in the backyard. Watering would be easy too. Plus, this can be moved easily. Perhaps a smaller row nearer to the sink? 

Lastly - a water feature. We love the idea of a pond in our tiny garden, but come on, it is after all a small plot in the car porch, not a full blown garden space. Then this comes along...

source: http://www.thegardenglove.com/diy-project-contemporary-garden-water-feature-less-than-30/

Looks fairly simply right?! Can't believe we were thinking of cementing, this solves everything! And it can be a small pond! Just big enough to rear our colourful guppies!

Now we just need to shop for the drills, circular saw and find the time to do all these... I can't wait!

Garden Make-over

Came weekend, and we went nursery-hopping at Sungai Buloh :) 

We came to love nursery-hopping after moving into our current home. But still we do not do this every weekend. Right day, right time; this is one activity that we really enjoy. We spent close to five hours driving around and popping in and out of the nurseries. It was only when the skylight started to filter out did we realised it was almost 7pm.

Our trophies:

• Enough succulents to cover the tail of the garden. We wanted to model portion of the garden to what we saw at Gardens by the Bay - lots of succulents.

• Enough white and yellow marigolds to cover the other portion of the front part of the garden. Marigolds need plenty of direct sun, and they bloom without the need for fertiliser. This is a plant that is supposedly to be very easy to maintain. Just water nearer to the soil instead of over the bloom. It thrives even in bad soil condition as long as there is water and the soil is well drain. 

• Some green oval shaped, low growing plants that hubby might like if they continue to stay low. No idea what is the name of it, but they complement the marigolds well. Something that we saw at Gardens by the Bay too. 

• Water hyacinth; our bonus! This has become our cultivating pot, and hopefully we can have not just more hyacinth but some guppy babies too :) As I googled more on hyacinth, pretty surprised to find water hyacinth is considered as a pest plant. Mainly because it is very invasive, and could cover the entire water body in a short period of time. This causes sun deficiency; aquatic plants below water surface could die and the fishes are not able to get their supply of oxygen too. Hence, never throw these plants into a water body. 

• Got some pretty glass bubbles recently, and we wanted to get some air plants for it. We did not find the air plant that we wanted at Sungai Buloh, but we found it at another nursery. A pretty blooming air plant :) After the bloom, we would most probably break up the cluster into individual plant to put it into the glass bubbles. 

I am not able to get a nice wide shoot of the entire garden, so have decided to do without it instead. 

The marigolds are right at the front, the water hyacinth is in the center and the succulents at the tail of the garden. The air plant is hanging some where at the further end of the succulents, near the wall. 

We still have our basil and pomegranate around, and we intend to check out the Vietnam apple tree soon!

Water-Garden

We tried to create a container-water-garden earlier this year with money plants and two swordtail fishes. Unfortunately, we failed miserably. We started to look around for proper aquatic plant, and we narrowed down to water hyacinth. It was ridiculously priced at a shop that we saw, something in the range of RM30 to RM50. It's afterall a water plant that is considered as a pest plant at the down under, the hobbit land and the states.

We sort of just lay low and kept the idea at the back of our mind, and continue our weekend nursery visits. We had been hoping to find it or something suitable to replace it.  

And, lucky us! We found a big pot for a nice price (RM18) along the stretch of Sungai Buloh. We were over the moon when we saw it!

The hyacinth bloomed about five days later, and the bloom lasted only for a day. Pretty things don't last...but still it was beautiful while it lasted. 

We wanted to get swordtail fish for the pot in the house. The bright orange goes extremely well with the green, but swordtail was out of stock in all those aquariums that we went to. When our friends finally bought a pair for us, they did not last for more than two days... One jumped out of the pot and died, the other just died. 

We managed to find some pretty guppies. They seemed to adapt rather quickly and we decided to stick to guppies for future pots. They somehow seem pretty happy with the aquatic-plant environment. 

We ended with two pots, one in the house and the other in the car porch. We decided to use the one in the car porch to cultivate more hyacinth, hence we left the yellow soil in the pot. According to the nursery, yellow soil aids water hyacinth's growth. We gotten a bigger pot and another three pairs of guppies for that. 

The pot in the house is without soil for aesthetics reason. We have two pairs of guppies in it, and it would help to eliminate the possibility of the breeding of mozzies.  

Hubby has a theory; he said the guppies' would develop nicer scale colour if the guppies have the chance to be in the sun. Well... the guppies in the pond do look nicer. So, I have been bringing it out to the back yard for sun almost daily. 

Check out the air bubbles between the roots! Water hyacinth has pretty purplish roots, and with the air bubbles, they look rather exquisite :)

One of the female guppies seems to be pregnant. Her tummy is bulging. We are getting ready another pot for the adult fishes so that they won't have the chance eat up all the babies when they are here. 

It's pretty therapeutic to watch them swim around. Kind of good to know that they would not die of hunger if we are back in Batu or away for holidays :)

Update @ 28 Sep 2016: 
This is an update to share where we got our water hyacinth. For easy reference, I will call the nursery where I got my water hyacinth as the water-hyacinth nursery. I didn't note the shop name of the watery-hyacinth nursery, but I got a picture of the nursery that's next to it:

This is NOT the water-hyacinth nursery, this is the nursery on the immediate left of it.

The water-hyacinth nursery is on the immediate right side of this nursery in the picture. The address that waze gave us is "Jalan BRP 7/1, Sungai Buloh, Selangor". 

We last visited the water-hyacinth nursery about 6 to 8 months ago. It was still there and we still saw water hyacinth around. There were occasions when we went and they did not have stock. 

We are Harvesting!

There is this sense of calmness when I dig and plant. It pleased me enormously to see the small strip of garden growing healthily. I even play the plants music when I read somewhere that plants grow better with music. I love the touch of soil on my hand and whenever I could, I would experiment interesting growing methods. Recently, we tried to cultivate  earthworms in the garden. I was told since young that where there is earthworms, the soil is good. We found out from friends that we could start by burying stuff like leftover fruits, vegetables scraps into the soil. Instead of using leftovers, which we were worried that it would take a long time to decompose, and invite tons of maggots, we decided to use the fruit waste from the juicer. These waste was a lot finer and drier; they were kind of powdery as well so it was the perfect candidate to be mixed into the soil. After three weeks, I found an earthworm! I was ecstatic! I snapped a shoot using my iPhone but the picture was not good enough. Duh.

The hubby harvested the kangkong from the garden a couple of nights ago and sent me the below photo. I love the kangkong mainly for its productivity, haha! After sowing the seeds, and making sure the seedlings sprout, there is nothing much to do except fertilising. According to the nursery, we just need to cut off the kangkong when it is tall enough to be harvested, and leave the plant alone to grow again for the next harvest :) This is what we lazy people love, haha!

Courtesy of hubby

Below are the green beans plants which were grown accidentally. There were about four, five green beans plants planted against the wall. From seedlings to fully grown and sprouting green bean pods, it took slightly more than two months. Except for some re location of the seedlings and fertilising, the plants grow relatively well. Our challenge had always been watering, and given the hubby's challenging hours, I frequently need to clear off dried plants whenever I am in KL. Hence, I was so thankful for the watering system; ever since installing the watering system, the plants' survival rate was almost 100%! 

Courtesy of hubby

A week or so more, I think the green beans should be ready to be snapped off. Now I am wondering whether these are the type of green beans which is usually being stir fry, or the harvested pods need to be beaned out? 

Courtesy of hubby

We are hoping to achieve about 60% to 70% self sufficiency hopefully by end of the year. This strip of garden did not come easy. When we first move in, the contractor overlaid the soil with a thick layer of sand. It looked nice and we thought we would leave it for the time being until the cats in the neighbourhood used it as a poo-ing ground. We grew grass next, and decided to get rid of it when the hubby's annoying backache from cutting the grass resulted in overgrown weeds. We tried numerous stuff before we came this far. Since we are lucky to have a comfortable size car porch, no kids running around to destroy my hard work (though there is a nasty cat around), end year bountiful harvest sounds really good, haha!

Miniature Vegetable Farm

It had been a long month for Chinese New Year celebration. And we had been clocking miles driving between the two homes. While the journey wasn't all that smooth as we wished for, plenty of jams as usual, the long drive on the road was nice. We did not get to spend much time together the past couple of months, and time on the drive was a nice catching-up time. We finally reached our home in KL last week. 

We went back to routine pretty quickly, work, houseworks, and gardening. The last round of vegetables that we planted did not make it to harvest. Some caught some moldy stuff from another seedling, some stopped growing and some simply died from thirst - the hubby was too busy to water them when I was not around. The only warrior that remains standing was a single broccoli. It looked promising and I re potted it directly to the ground. 

We had also added an amateur watering system to feed water directly to the garden. We had installed a water filtering system for the entire house when we first moved in. As part of the filter cleaning, the filter was set to an automatic timer and it would self clean on daily basis. To make use of the water that get flush out during the self cleaning, we attached pipe extension and ran it to the inner garden bed which was sheltered from both rain and direct sun. It was not the most advance system, but at least the soil should be moist enough to prevent seedlings dying from thirst again. 

Hence, last weekend, we made our way to our favourite nursery in Sunway intending to pick up some flowers for the front garden bed. And we found treasures! There was this uncle who gave us tips on how to grow vegetables and we got some really good quality seeds from him. We didn't feel the seeds were more expensive than those that we usually get from the supermarket. He taught us to keep the remaining seeds in the fridge if we are not able to finish them. 

We potted the seeds into a potting tray that very same day. Guess what! The seeds sprouted after two days!

We repotted some of the seedlings that sprouted over the last two days before we went off to Genting for an overnight stay. Six rows of a mini Choy Sum farm when I was done! 

We planted some Kangkong seeds directly to the ground, potted some lady fingers and chili padi. Hopefully the next trip when I am back in KL, the choy sum would be ready for harvest and seedlings from the rest would have sprouted healthily!

Gardening @ Kemuning

I have always envision self sufficiency in vegetables supply if I ever have a garden. Well, I do have a small "strip" of garden, haha! To reach self sufficiency might be a tad challenging unless I start to make use of the land around the estate :)

Hubby likes gardening, but he needs that push and doing it alone certainly isn't his first choice. Come one sunny Sunday, we decided to get our hands dirty and try our chance at growing our vegetables from scratch with the seeds we bought. Oh ya, the gardening was also to "cat proof" it.

The cat or cats, we have no idea if it is a gang or does it work solo. We would smell urine, poo early in the morning when we open our front door. Seeing the freshly planted grass dig up repeatedly was enough to made me wanted to hose the cat(s) with water! We tried to line the soil with small white pebbles and it did not work. Hence hubby suggested getting huge, gigantic ones. And it worked! 

We planted kangkong, habanero chilli, broccoli, aloe vera and xiao bai cai. And of course flowers!

Hubby loves chilli, the hotter the better. We were at the nursery and by chance we saw habanero chilli and the nursery owner told us it was one of the hottest chilli around. Having a chilli plant is always one of the things that is on our check list, and if it is the hottest, we were definitely getting it!

Aloe vera is one of the first plant in our house. It is useful for skin allergies, or simply for aloe vera jelly, a thoroughly useful plant.

We are still waiting for the rest of the vegetables to get to their full size. It may sound kind of crazy but when I am in KL, I would play music for them for a couple of hours everyday. Simple, instrumental music and a bit of meddling, watering.

Hope we can harvest soon!