Great minds think alike.. Repurposing Rain Gutters as Veggie Beds

This will be a quick one, as I am inspired by a discussion with some friends on successful veggie planting in a recycled rain gutter.

When we installed a perspex awning over our front porch, we had to have a portion of our rain gutter removed. I had the half-baked idea then of digging a hole to bury the spout for water drainage, filling the space with soil and planting veggies in it. Except I never got around to doing it.

So a few weeks ago I hit upon the idea of sticking the gutter into existing rain drains that run around the house (all kitchen/bathroom waste water goes straight into the septic tank, so our rain drains that run around the perimeter of the house are fairly clean and unclogged because only rain water runs through them).

As fate would have it, just as I hauled a heavy sack of soil out of my car, the sky darkened and drops of moisture pattered the ground. I knew I had to work fast. I dragged the rain gutter in to the drain, stuffed the spout with some rags and propped up the other end with an unused pot so excess water could drain out the spout via gravity.

The pics explain it so much better than I can:

The rain gutter nestled in the drain by a patch of daikon radish, sayur putih (Chinese lettuce methinks?) and sayur raja (I have no idea what this is called in English)

This end is propped up with a pot with rocky clumps of soil. I prolly need to use something else in the future should I want to use the pot.

Spout/hole at the other end stuffed with rags.

After this, the next step is to add soil, compost etc. and leave to mature for a few days before transplanting. It seems that the simple drainage system is working.

I should really start sowing seeds but I've been so busy lately with a cat illness. My poor Yoruichi...

Sowing the Seeds of Love..

Terung pipit in full bloom.

Update: all my cucumber plants did not survive, neither did my French beans :-( The main reason being was that I was travelling too much, so my plants were left to fend for themselves. Out of guilt before a 4-day trip I fertilised my plants with a coffee-smelling fertiliser that I thought was organic. (I thought it is okay to be a bit heavy-handed with organic fertilisers, because they don't harm your plants much). Yeah right. Too much fertiliser + lack of water (I suspect it was very hot while I was away) = dried-up plants. Sigh.

So today, seeing the weather is somewhat cloudy, I will direct sow some seeds into the ground.

• Roselle - in a pot, 5 seeds
• French beans - by the fence, 2 seeds, by cat enclosure, 2 seeds
• Spring onion - in existing spring onion pot
• Chives - on kailan bed
• Coriander - in existing coriander pot
• Loofah - in DIY pot made from soil bag

Didn't take any pictures today as I was a bit rushed for time. But here is a picture taken 2 months ago, when my chillis were still healthy and blooming. I did not eat any of these lovely chillis as I wanted to save them for seed. Then disaster struck: the leaves started to wilt, then the fruit, then the whole tree. The source of the disease is from another chilli plant I foolishly bought, thinking all the while parts of it looked a little bit wilted due to the hot weather.

Juicy purple chillies. Alas, thou art not mine to keep!

Good thing is that I still have a couple of these plants which survived the wilt. I hope this means the survivors have become immune to the disease.

Live long and prosper! Insha Allah.

Sunshine and Rain but No Rainbows. Oh well. It was a Great Day Nonetheless.

My French beans seem to be sprouting! I sowed them on Wednesday.

These French bean shoots are a gorgeous aubergine colour. I wonder if the plant will retain this colouring?

Cucumber plants from seeds bought at my local supermarket. I filled an old container with cheap soil from a nursery mixed with potted soil with copra. Previous attempts at sowing cucumber seeds resulted in complete failure (well, I just tossed the seeds and sort of watered them, not very regularly, so no wonder then!) -so I wasn't very hopeful this would work out. I did stick them in vertically rather than just dumping them on the soil. Alhamdulillah many of them grew. Now I think they look a bit elongated from being in the shade too much. I might move it to a sunnier spot out of the rain, because this box has no holes. I can't bear to ruin a box by making holes in them.

Must... find.. more.. light....

These tomato plants in the adjacent box are from when we made tomato sauce to go with our meatzza. I let the seeds dry out/ferment in the kitchen for a week before tossing them in this box. I ought to plant them out soon before they become too entangled.

Me thinks it's getting a bit too crowded in here..

Some hopefuls:

• bell pepper (saved in the kitchen), 
• Genovese basil (supermarket seed), 
• Hawaiian salad (supermarket seed),
• okra (wet market)
• Chinese cabbage (tanamsendiri.com)
• coriander (tanamsendiri.com)
• white radish (tanamsendiri.com)
• loofah plant (tanamsendiri.com)

They are under a roof, but do get some sunlight.

And what I learnt: do not re-pot plants in the morning, else your plants might wilt a bit.

In other news, my spring onions seem to be doing well. :-)

Watermelon + Bad, Brown Rice = Bad, Beet Kvass = Good

Blue rice in Nasi Kerabu. No, I don't think they use brown rice.

For the past 2-3 months I have been buying brown rice to mix in with our Ponni low-carb rice, as a little experiment to see whether we/I could tolerate brown rice. Although brown rice is definitely not Paleo nor Primal, the recent debate on safe starches had me pondering my way of eating: what if I can actually tolerate brown rice, and what if I have been missing out on its purported health benefits all this while? I am aware of the anti-nutrients in unprocessed grains, so I made sure to soak the brown rice at least 30 minutes prior to cooking. What I usually do is have a small tupperware of brown rice soaking in my fridge so I'll be able to cook rice in a jiffy.

Then a couple of weeks ago I came down with a bad case of diarrhea due to watermelon. I had avoided this fruit for years because it makes me throw up. Well, this time having a pre-dawn meal of homemade watermelon juice caused gastric pains an hour before breaking fast. After iftar things headed steadily south, literally. About 2 weeks before that I had stopped taking my daily yoghurt because I was bored of it. Instead I turned to tapai a few days a week, whereas I used to eat yoghurt daily.

So my gut flora weren't what they used to be, and possibly my eating brown rice was slowly eroding my gut flora. Why do I say this? Yesterday for the first time in weeks I had white rice, without any brown rice mixed in. And afterwards I was struck by how great my stomach felt. I hadn't realised I was having flatulence all this while. This is really weird for me because I normally pay close attention to my gut (literally). Just to test things further, tonight I had brown rice again. Not long after dinner, the symptoms reappeared: bloating, stomach distension.  I had a sip of my newly-prepared beet kvass, it tasted like salty beetroot. About half an hour later I burped out most of the gas, and my bloating reduced considerably.

I feel so much better now.

So no more brown rice for me I guess. It will make great bird seed.

Plant Labels from Recycled Chopsticks

I brought home the disposable, single-use chopsticks me and hubby used at Sushi King, thinking that there will be a use for them later. And there was indeed. :-) I used a permanent marker pen to write on the chopsticks.

Gardening Checklist

Things I want to do:

• Reuse laundry soapnut liquid on plants as pesticide
  
• Plant garlic in a pot
• Repot tomato seedlings to give away
• Replant tomato plants near chainlink fence
• Take a photo of mango shoot growing in compost heap
• Research noni tree characteristics
  
• Replant noni/mengkudu plant into permanent location
• Check papaya seeds in corner of garden
  

Experiment: Growing a Radish from its Top

Out of curiosity, I bought an organic white radish the other day. It was delicious in my chicken soup :-). I cut off its top, and remembered what I read in a children's encyclopedia as a child:

Image taken from http://www.hunkinsexperiments.com/pages/carrots.htm

See the image on the right? As a child I tried that for a while, then it got mistakenly thrown away. Now I wonder: if I plant this in the ground, will a new root grow out of it? Will I get a new radish?

So this is what I did and I do hope it works:

Here is the radish top I have.

I just buried it in between my 'baby' carrots.