Borlotti & Tongue of Fire Beans

I haven't been succeeded with Borlotti or Tongue of Fire Beans. I germinated Borlotti beans around January and repotted it in February. We were still having drought and high temperature as the effect of the volcano eruption nearby (about 88 km away). So, I tried to water my plants a couple of times a day. This I suspected as one of the causes beside the extreme temperature that could reach 37-38 degree Celcius. It had grown healthily at first and started to set fruit but soon I noticed that the base stem were turning brown and dried, which is the symptoms of Fusarium wilt. This condition disrupted the flow of water and nutrition from the roots to the plant, and eventually caused death. I had to pull it out and grieved for the bean pods that turning yellow ― of those I had never had the chance to harvest...

In March I planted Tongue of Fire Beans and the same problem happened. Well, I bought the seeds from a US-bassed seed seller, I suspected they are not suitable for planting in tropical weather with its high temperature and humidity.

How about you? Do you have any experience planting them in tropical weather? How's it going?

Finishing Crochet Projects

Hi, how are you doing today? What are you up to? Are you finishing some projects lately? As for me, I'm doing the finishing touch to my bag projects which I initially started in 2011, but then left them halfway as I immersed into my teaching and translating routine, and only continued to finish them this year. I just need to add cotton cloth for the inner layer. I'll show you the pictures once I finished them.

Weather Anomaly

I took these pictures from my rooftop garden a couple months ago to showcase the challenges we are facing more these days with the effect of global warming, ie extreme weather.

How to Crochet Prince or Princess Crown

These are the pictures of the crocheted-Prince-or-Princess-crown headband I made for a friend's baby daughter, who was celebrating her 1st birthday about a year ago, using this-very-easy-to-follow step-by-step tutorial:

My First Harvest of Eggplants

I am not good at keeping a garden tally. It might be because I'm still harvesting in smale scale or just too excited to go ahead and process it into meals. The fact is, I usually went up to my rooftop garden to harvest things I needed to cook at that moment. So, maybe that's the reason I didn't really remember to scale and keep the tally, except for taking some pictures of it. I might start doing it for the future, we'll see...

So, here's some eggplant which was processed into this yummy dish. Basically it's a mixed veggies dish (eggplant + baby corn), cooked in spicy fermented soya sauce.