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Showing posts with label balcony farming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label balcony farming. Show all posts

Thursday, January 6, 2022

Starting My "Bahay Kubo"

We had just moved to a new apartment when the first lockdown in SG started. We got lucky then because the day after we moved everything was restricted. One of the difficulties we experienced was getting groceries. Getting a delivery schedule was really hard since that was the time a lot of people shifted to buying supplies online. 


I realized we had to be more resilient and that's why I started to plant veggies in our balcony. I'm starting to do the same now in our new home. Getting groceries is easier now, but I noticed there are some veggies that are hard to get, i.e. lettuce. My Mom had  a lot of it when Kuya set up a hydroponic garden, but it's been replaced with ornamental plants now, haha. I've been trying to read on setting up a small hydroponic garden for green leafy veggies. This way we can have the needed ingredients to prepare salads. 


What's easy to grow: mustasa, spring onions and leek. For spring onions and leek, just use what you buy from the store. After a day of soaking the stem in water with a drop of honey, I just planted it in soil. Now I get it anytime I need it (nice to top sinangag!). Mustasa was the first veggie I was able to grow successfully. If I was going to have a farm, I'll probably have a mustasa farm hahaha. 

What takes time but fulfilling to grow: tomatoes and bell pepper. I prefer to grow stuff from seed. I had a good run of growing tomatoes and bell peppers in SG. I hope I can do better here since the soil is richer. Ahh, will have good use for our rice wash again. 

What I'm wary to grow: calamansi. I used to have calamansi in one of our previous homes, but it attracted caterpillars and I had a hard time controlling it. We had to transfer it to my Mom because it got crazy. It is very useful though to have one or two calamansi plants, so will think about it. 

What I want to grow: onions, lettuce, eggplant, cucumber and maybe carrots and kangkong. I thought about growing garlic, but apparently it takes a long time before you can harvest (six months). I already planted two red onions, but I made a mistake and will have to pull it out to fix the error. 

We don't really need a lot, so I hope planting veggies can help us have access to what we just need. Also this will help us prevent wasting supplies. I haven't thought about what herbs to plant. It's Sweetie who has been interested in planting herbs. I hope he'll plant basil, rosemary and oregano since I use those for pasta hehe. 

My Mom has been upset that I don't have any flowers in my garden. She's already started to give me plants. I don't want to have too many plants because I want to make sure we're able to take care of them. Watering our current garden already takes up an hour to finish. Good thing Miggy's been able to help me since there are days when my energy is MIA. I have to think of a way to keep Mom's garden from overflowing into mine, hahaha. 

I'm also grateful that I'm able to do some gardening now. I had to give it up when things got hairy health-wise. So need to make sure it's manageable for all of us. 

#BeKind #StayHome

Friday, September 11, 2020

Unwanted Bee Visitors!

When I sat down to start work this morning I was so surprised when a bee started buzzing around me. I was so scared to shoo it away because I've been stung by bees before. I think the bee was attracted by my manager's voice (LOL!) because it would come near me whenever he talked! I was probably visibility stressed coz my manager told me not to move and just ignore it. It only went away when we finished the call.

Bees from that time I visited Guimaras.

I'm happy when I see bees visiting my tiny garden. There's one that's been actively checking out the mustasa plant and I think it's been helping pollinate the tomatoes too. I'm just really wary when they come near me because I was stung by a bee, twice, when I was young. I was playing tennis (against a wall) and I guess there was a bee that was flying around that got annoyed by the ball. I still remember how painful it was.

I got so busy I only saw the bee again after conducting an interview. It was hanging out on the dining room light. Funny thing is I had another call with my manager and the bee started coming near me again! Hahaha. Sweetie came to the rescue and caught the bee with a bag and he let it out in the balcony. That was when he discovered 5 more bees buzzing around the living room. We were wondering how it got in.

Sweetie eventually saw that the balcony door on the opposite end was open. It was probably left open by our cleaner (she has a penchant for forgetting to lock doors/windows -- she left our bedroom window open around the time I had severe asthma!). Anyway, we have to make sure that everything's closed after she does cleaning for us.

So that's how we got unwanted bee visitors inside the house today. They're always welcome to hang out in my tiny garden. I hope we got all of them, but I think there's one more hiding around the curtain.


CB//157 #StuckAtHomeDay/187 #WFH107  #StayHome #BeKind   

Sunday, August 30, 2020

What We Did with the First Tomato Harvest

Finally the first tomato fruit was ripe for picking! It was only one tomato though so we wanted to use it for something special.



We found ready to eat hollandaise sauce the other day and thought we'd make eggs benedict with it. Eggs ben is one of my favorite breakfast dishes. I watched Gordon Ramsay's video last night to learn how to make poached eggs. Three out of the four turned out well. I fried the honey baked ham and toasted the bread a bit in its fat.

Sweetie did the plating --



I ate the tomato together with a spoonful of eggs ben. It was too small though, but the thought of eating organic, homegrown tomato gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling hehe. I hope the other tomato fruits would grow bigger!



CB//145 #StuckAtHomeDay/175 #StayHome #BeKind 




Friday, August 7, 2020

Balcony Farm to Table: Dad's Beef Mustasa Recipe [Mustasa Taco]

My beautiful mustasa was ripe for the picking. I finally harvested it the other day and we had it for dinner.



I made Dad's beef mustasa dish. We did not really have a name for it and just called it mustasa. I hope I did justice to his recipe because he didn't measure anything when he taught me how to cook this dish. My Dad has magic hands when he cooks. He never measures anything! He just throws stuff int he pot and everything tastes good.



My Dad's beef mustasa dish is like eating a fresh taco. I skipped the liver spread in the video because I couldn't find any here in Singapore, but do try cooking it with liver spread. We finished the 4 huge mustasa leaves I harvested and it looks like it's going to give us more to harvest soon!

My beautiful mustasa :)


Here are the ingredients:

1/2 kg ground beef
2 cloves garlic (or more)
1 red onion, chopped
1/2 tsp peppercorn
2 beef cubes
1/2 cup vinegar
1/2 to 1 Tbsp sugar (to taste)
1 can Reno liver spread (optional)

CB//122 #StuckAtHomeDay/152 #WFH89 #StayHome #BeKind