Growing in my garden…

I’ve been plucking my butterfly pea flowers…

…and sending them over to my friends at Payung for their nasi kerabu.

I read somewhere that the flowers must be plucked or once they wither, they will produce seeds and the leaves will not grow luxuriantly anymore. No wonder I saw dried leafless vines with lots of seeds dangling from them. I am supposed to take the seeds, remove the “dead” vines and plant afresh. Well, the good news is ever since I started plucking the flowers and the seeds and removing those unwanted vines, new leaves have appeared and it is starting to look good again…and yes, I do pluck the pods and take out the seeds so if anyone would like to plant their own, they can always get them from me too…anytime.

One thing about the flowers, they seem to come back with a vengeance. I pluck all of them one day, more will bloom the very next day, even more than the day before. Of course, those people at Payung will not need so much so if anyone would like them to use for the natural colour in their nasi kerabu or nyonya kuihs…or their drinks or whatever, they can drop by my place to get them, free of charge.

The wife of an ex-student of mine saw my Facebook posts on the leaves and asked for some so I told her to come over to my house and I gave her the ones I plucked that day plus the seeds. The following evening, she PM-ed to tell me that she was on the way to my house and she gave me these…

the rice tinted with the natural colouring from the flowers (her second attempt at making the kuih, she said) and she also gave me these chicken quiches…

…that she made. Thank you so much, Fong & Henry.

In the meantime, my Brazilian spinach…

…is growing very well too, so well that I’ve been harvesting it ever so often and giving bags and bags of it to my neighbour (they shrink badly in the process of cooking) – she says her grandchildren love it! If I am not wrong, they use it at Payung for their herbs salad so perhaps one of these days, I can give them some too. For one thing, I do not use pesticides, 100% organic, so some of the leaves would be quite badly eaten by whatever and would have holes all over. I would just cut and throw those away even though my missus said that I should not do that. Since the pests will eat it, she said, it should be good for us too – what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. LOL!!!

I planted some sweet potato leaves sometime ago and they grew rampantly and went completely out of control. We ate and ate till we got quite tired of it so I got rid of all of it. After all this while, I felt like eating it again and that day, I bought a bundle from my neighbourhood shop. We ate the leaves and I planted the stalks/stems. They seem to be growing pretty well…

Hopefully, we can harvest and eat our own-grown sweet potato leaves soon.

I saw that FINALLY my cangkok manis…

…is thriving not too badly so I decided to harvest the leaves to cook and eat. At the same time, I selected the bigger, sturdier stems/stalks and pushed them into the ground in the hope that they will sprout leaves so we shall have even more to enjoy the next time around.

I thought there was not enough for a dish so I went to buy some baby corn and sweet potatoes to cook sayur masak lemak (vegetables cooked with santan/coconut milk). It turned out that there was enough to cook on its own so we just fried it with egg…

…but we did throw in a packet of the baby corn.

Not too bad, don’t you think? At least I am getting something back from all those things growing in my garden after all my effort day in and day out.