There have been a lot of activities in the balcony garden last two weeks. More seeds arrived from Korea and I have been busy planting. Now I have baby chicory, broccoli, kale, Chinese cabbage, red cabbage, and raddish. It should only take 2-3weeks to grow and I can add them to my salad.
They are really simple to grow. All you need is a piece of kitchen towel, a bowl and some water. In the instruction packet, it said to water them 2-3 times a day with water spray. I started off with baby radish first. Only a few more days to go and these little baby sprouts are going into my salad!
Next one is baby Chinese cabbage, like the ones used in kimchi. Instead of growing in a bowl, I am growing them in soil to see how big they get. I am curious to see how they will look in 3 weeks.
Now some updates on the ones I planted in the beginning of February.
- My Thai cucumbers are growing really well. It’s ready to be transplanted to bigger pots. I just need to find some space on my balcony.
- The Korean perilla plants are looking really healthy. The outer leaves are almost ready to be picked but I am going to resist and wait for them to grow a little taller. A little creepy crawly got to one of my leaves already which taught me to check the back of the leaves more frequently. I thought I was only one eying the perilla leaves…
- The most exciting result this week is my cucumber. I harvested one cucumber already a few days ago. When I cut it in half, the skin looked and felt really thick but they were sweet and refreshing. According to my research, you need to pick the first vegetable early, so there will be many more. The name tags keep falling off so I not sure which cucumber this is exactly but from memory I think it’s the seeds I bought from Malaysia.
- My information appears to be correct because after I picked my first cucumber, a few more started to appear. In the past, I haven’t had a lot of success with cucumbers in Singapore. I thought it was just the weather but now I think I found the secret. Cucumbers need lots water and calcium. I learnt that crushed egg shells are a great source of calcium. All you need to do wash and dry them and put them through a spice grinder to turn them into powders.
- Cucumbers have both male and female flowers. The cucumbers grow from the female flowers. To help them along, I have artificially hand pollinated the female flowers by cutting back the surrounding petals of male flowers and dabbing it inside female flower. The picture above is two days after the female flower has been hand pollinated. Today I had a look at the cucumber and it’s now half the size of my hand.
- Finally, I have been picking lots of cherry tomatoes from my garden. It’s not enough to have a salad with but it keep us smiling everytime we get to taste a real tomato straight off the vine. 🙂
