garden of abundance.. II

If you have read my entry on my dad's garden of abundance, you would know that my dad loves to garden and my house's garden is filled with crops and vegetables.. and here are some of the 'new' crops....

nice green lettuce

calamansi or "limau kasturi"

yam plants.. a few more months before harvest

okra or more commonly known as 'lady finger'

Fragrant leaves and lemon grass.. or commonly referred to as 'pandan' and 'serai'

Can you guess what these are? they are green beans (绿豆)!! or to be more accurate, 'mung beans'.

we need to wait until the pods turned black before harvesting.... sometimes, the green mung bean plants look so similar to the red ones (red mung beans or 红豆）that my mum can't be sure what beans she had harvest until she peel them out of their pods!







Frankly, I am quite hopeless in recognizing plants.. if not for my dad, I can't even differentiate a durian tree from a rambutan tree.. and unfortunately too, I did not inherit his green fingers.. but I don't mind getting dirty or working up a sweat under the sun.. so I think I might cut it as an agriculturist, if I decided to hang up my PhD (after obtaining it first, that is).. :p

Okay, back to the garden..

ginger plant..

pumpkin.. ornamental ones, not those edible types..

long beans.. beside a banana tree and a tiny banana sprout..

Sugar apple plant.. my dad did not plant this.. the birds did it.. the nature's way... As the garden has plenty of trees and shades, birds like to 'hang-out' here.. and they kinda eat and poop here too.. so lots of 'unauthorized' germination happening.. If not for my dad's superb plant recognition skills, he would have chopped off this plant before it can even flower much less bear fruit, like now... :)

winged beans

Other than these, there are also dragon fruits (pitaya), chilies, pineapples, papayas and bananas.. And I really like to spend the early evenings gathering crops.. cutting chillies and looking for harvestable crops.. like these..

some of the veg I've gathered..

Too bad we can't rear any chickens in our compound.. then we would have a source of protein to supplement all these greens.. Seriously, with the world climate going crazy - devastating droughts, floods and fires in many food producing regions, food prices are sure to rise.. thus it is always good to be self-sufficient even if it is not 100%..

You can do without all those high tech gadgets (like iPhone, iPad, etc), but you definitely need to eat, no? So maybe now is a good time to be a farmer... ;)