India Restropective: Part 5 – Farming

India inspired me at various levels and one was to hopefully have my own little garden some day. Farming is really quite gratifying. There is something to be said about giving to the land and have it give back to you. Like most other Singaporeans my age, we grew up with stories about our grandparents living through the war by eating tapioca they grew in their gardens. We, on the other hand, know dilly do about how to harvest food from the land, let alone preparing the land to start farming.

So you can imagine my astonishment when I saw broccoli. sweet peas, cabbage and califlower (Jules, they reminded me of you everyday!!) growing out of the ground. I was even lucky to see them in their various stages of growth. Broccolis start small and grow. Here’s how tiny they can be:-

That’s my husband’s hand next to the baby broccoli. So cute, right? I also learned how when onions and garlic are ready to be harvested the plant on the top starts to die. Nature is pretty cool that way. My favourite thing about growing your own vegetables is COMPOSTING.

That’s when I realise how much of our garbage we throw out daily can be reused. In India, we clear the food waste twice a day in compost but the other kinds of garbage only needed to be cleared every two or three days. Now that I’m home, it hits me even more as I throw parts of veggies that we don’t eat and leftovers, they really take up most of our garbage. I reckon we might solve our garbage problems if we have composting facilities in Singapore. Part of me thinks our humidity may not help our composting situation but if I ever have a little garden, I’ll learn more about composting in Singapore.

Also, do you know you can grow certain flowers next to certain vegetables to encourage certain bugs that will eat the bugs that will eat the veggies. Talk about natural farming 🙂 The flowers make the farm look pretty too.