It’s one of those rare Fridays. I teach at neither the business schools in Paris nor at the university near my house today. I don’t have the occasional online English sessions with the adult learners either. I have the whole day to myself. A free day in the week makes the 24 hours of no …
Strawberry Tart I should have paid more attention to my patch of strawberries. My negligence has led to the discard of many strawberries that got sunburnt. The discarded ones have either turned mushy (early stage of sunburnt) or have shrivelled up. This year, I have picked the strawberries almost two weeks later than June last …
Spring is here. Weather is warmer. Colours are back. Flowers are everywhere. Life is dandy, right? No! My garden is being marauded by slugs and snails, and I don’t know what else. I was looking forward to enjoying the spectacular view of homegrown colourful tulips in April—views of long, slender, green stalks holding up the …
In my last post on 4 March, I started the new homegrown vegetable season by sowing tomato seeds. I planted 3 tomato varieties in 9 little pots and left them to germinate. Since frost might still strike this region anytime between March and May, the future seedlings would have to sit on my veranda until …
Mesclun greens, Carrots and Spinach I have not been lazing around since the sowing of the tomato seeds. I followed up two weeks later sowing the seeds of carrots, spinach and mesclun greens which I bought from Jardiland, the local gardening store. This time the sowing took place outdoor though, directly in the vegetable bed. …
We are in March and spring will officially arrive in 20 days’ time. The days get longer but the weather is still unpredictable. The night temperature remains between minus two to zero degree Celsius, with the highs reaching 8 to 9 degrees in the day. With the freezing temperature, I am afraid that the morning …
Our second round of tomatoes for this year. This time is the cherry tomatoes. We have two species of tomatoes in our garden. One species produces medium-sized round tomatoes; we started picking them a couple of weeks ago. These tomatoes are from the young plants from Jardiland, our local garden store. The second species is …
For the past few days, I have been pausing expressly at one unobtrusive corner of my garden whenever I make my daily garden rounds. In this little corner, there are some blackberry branches trailing high up along the wall separating our land from that of our neighbours on the right. The offshoots of these branches extend …
During my almost one-month stay in Singapore, I was worried how my little garden back home in France would turn out in my absence. My other half came to Singapore a week after me; it meant that the garden was not looked after for three weeks. We did not know our neighbours well enough to …
The long awaited STRAWBERRY Harvest is finally here! Strawberries that come directly from the garden behind the house to my plate. Strawberries that are not cooped up and subjected to thousands of miles taken in a commercial refrigerated cargo truck, driven from some unknown farm to one of those ubiquitous supermarket stores, and displayed forlornly …