Urban Farming for Food

Note: No part of this document, be it pictures or content can be reproduced/reused without written permission from this blog owner. #Revisioning Revision 1 published on 21 Oct 2020 Revised edition on 17 Mar 2022 I am a film believer of soil health and beneficial microbes. I personally witnessed my clayey orange soil  transformed to  rich dark loamy texture soil over time with right beneficial microbes introduced when I first embarked on the journey to grow food for own consumption.  Yes, it takes time as compare to instant results using chemicals but it is definitely worth the while in the long run. I struggled for the first half to one year, see lights on second year and simply love it thereafter. 10 years on, you can take anything from my plot, but not my microbes rich soil. To grow food for fun and have that occasional harvests is a great experience. Growing food with expected harvests outcome at timely manner bring planting to a total different level. To have that, soil health is a

Over the years, have seen lots of Youtube videos on rooting and regrowing vegetables from vegetable scraps. However, my experience doing that in tropical weather have not been very successful all this while. Most of the time, the high humidity causes the vegetable scraps to rot eventually. During the Covid-19 lock down period, with time at hand and homebound, I decided to document the whole journey of regrowing leek from scraps using both water method and soil.  Leek is chosen for convenience as it is supposedly easy to grow. S ome do look lush initially but unfortunately all eventually never able to flourish further. In short, it is a fun discovery journey  but to grow for food, it is better off to start with proper seeds or cuttings. We started off with leek from the supermarket. Cut off 2 inches of base. The rest we use them for cooking as per normal. Fig 1,  Two inches of the base. No roots. We started off with this Water rooting is used for a start. 1-2mm of water

Most of the older generations are very familiar with consuming long bean leaves as food. Black bean leaves actually taste very similar to long bean leaves. We grew black bean some times back for the delicious nutritional black beans. Along the way, surprises keep popping up. Not only are the beans delicious, the leaves taste as good as the green bean leaves. Even the young pods/beans can be stir fry and eaten as a dish! In short, almost every parts of the plant can be eaten at different stages of growth. Best of all, they actually taste good. The bean vines grow pretty fast. At day 4, the sprouts will be about 15cm tall already.  They should be about 1 foot tall by month one and will need some kind of support from then.  The figure below shows 2 rows of 2 months old vines at about 1m height  Fig 2: 2 months old black bean Vine.  The typical spacing needed per vine is 30x30cm, if you plant them in a planter bed. For best result, the depth of planter should b

It has been a long while since our last posts. Lots have happened and we went a long way.  Managed to be self sustained on our vegetables sources for a while already. But that is only for own families and closed friends. The onset of convid-19 pandemic hits every countries in the globe hard, forcing businesses to close, air traffic stops, countries went into lockdown/standstills and many lost their lives.  That is when you really feel the important of having essential food sources locally, within the country is so  very important.  In a lockdown situation where all are confined to own home and even essential workers reduced to minimum counts and hence manpower stretched, it is so important to be able to grow something fast with least effort. More so for perishable item like fresh vegetables which have very short shelf life. Starting June, we will restart our biweekly post on Friday, starting with black beans, an easy crops that can achieve just that.  Stay tune !