Green fingers…

One advantage of living in the country would be the fact that you have a lot of land all around you to plant your own fruits and vegetables and whatever. That, of course, is a good thing in this day and age with the escalating prices of virtually everything. Unfortunately, you can’t do that if you’re staying in high rise apartments and condominiums in the city or even if you do have a landed property, there will be so little land around the house to do much…and most people would rather use whatever they may have for landscaping to beautify the surroundings by planting flowers and decorative leaves and trees.

Unfortunately, not all can grow stuff successfully – one would need to have green fingers in order to do it well…and I am pretty sure that Melissa’s neighbour at the staff quarters in her rural school is pretty good at it. When I sent Melissa back there after the week-long holidays, I noticed that he has been busy and has planted a lot of things in the available land.

Now, let’s see if you can name all the things he has planted. I am sure many of you would know what these are (PICTURE 1)…

…and you probably can identify those with the five-petal leaves…

…but what about those with the heart-shaped ones (PICTURE 2)?

These are creepers so the guy had to put up those sticks for the  plants to climb (PICTURE 3)…

Later the flowers would appear and subsequently, the fruits.

You would have seen these in the pictures earlier (PICTURE 4)…

I love the sweet variety, selling at around RM6.00 for four at a shop near my house. What I know is they get their supply from out of town in bundles of 5 or 6…and they would untie them and take out 1 or 2 to make their own new bundles…and sell them all at the same price – RM6 for 4. Tsk! Tsk!

Many of you would know these too, I suppose (PICTURE 5a)…

– it seems that they are not that tolerant of heat or direct sunlight so that is why the guy has built some kind of shed over the vegetable beds.

Here’s another look at the same (PICTURE 5b)…

…and this one is pretty familiar too, I’m sure (PICTURE 6)…

Now, can anyone give me the names of all the vegetables in the photographs? If you can, you probably deserve a prize, right? Let’s see how it goes. Come, give it a shot!