Sunlight and vegetables

Nothing like seeing the morning sunlight filtering in through the green foliage when you are having your morning cup of tea. 

This is the first time that we are trying the Red Cabbage in our garden.  They are blooming well along with the normal cabbage.  We may have to wait another 3 months to pluck them.  

We found that these Grow Bags are better than normal conventional pots and it is cost effective too.

The Radish too are coming up well and it is about time to pluck them for our next salad. I wonder why they are always peeping out of the soil. 

It may take another day or two for the lettuce leaves to join the radish in the salad 

Daily morning I see one or two of these yellow flowers fully bloomed waiting for the bees. They fall off by evening. These flowers are from the sponge gourd creeper.. 

The decorative flowers are managing to hold on in one corner.

Looks like the green chillies are going to be surplus this year too. Last year there was continuous growth for six months. 

But what has got me really excited is the sight of these bunch of flowers that has come up on our Vanilla creeper. Its flowered after a gap of 2 years. 

Five years ago I had written in detail about the flowering cycle and the artificial pollination that one has to do for the Vanilla.

In a bunch, one or two flowers bloom in a day. They have to be artificially pollinated before noon. The ideal time is 9 to 10 am (they slowly close up as the sun gets hotter) If the flowers are successfully pollinated, they dry up but hold on to the stem. These stem (stalk) behind the flower grow thicker and ultimately becomes the Vanilla pods. In my attempt to pollinate, I see about 30% success this year. It requires patience and practice.  

The regular tomatoes are coming up well with the perfect round shape, but the cherry tomatoes are a peculiar variety. Never seen these oval shaped ones before. 

The mint leaves have got its perfect green sheen. I always put in a mint leaf along with a blade of lemon grass (cut into small pieces) in my morning tea.  Apart from its medicinal benefits, the aroma is very pleasing.  

A twig of the mint went into the decoration of the flan that we had yesterday. 

  

Chutney

I tried making the traditional chutney (with some changes) and now all at home are of the opinion that  I am the chutney expert.

So come Sunday and the first thing that I have to do (after my morning tea) is to make the chutney.

This is to go with the breakfast which could be Idli or dosa or appam or uttappam.

One of the reasons why the family likes this chutney is the green colour.

Adding the ingredients in the right proportion is the trick.

Grated coconut is the base, to which I add a few pods of garlic, a little shaving of ginger, a few bulbs of the small onions (commonly known as the sambhar onion) a little bit of imli (tamarind) , one long green chilli, a few leaves of pudina (mint) and lots of curry leaves (yes that is the secret ingredient that makes the whole chutney go green) Of course salt to taste.

Grind all these together in a mixer by adding a little warm water till you get a good paste.

The final step is to do the seasoning with  rai (mustard seeds) and one or two dried red chilly, a few curry leaves and lo behold the chutney is ready.

This is not as green as my usual chutney.
I had to click this before it was set on the table (along with uttappa)

Now don’t ask me how to make uttappa. That is my wife’s department. 

Kitchen Garden

After the last post there were many who were fascinated by the kitchen garden and wanted to know how we managed it.
Frankly speaking we did not take any special effort to grow these.
Some of the things that we have are:
Ginger, Curry leaves , Mint, chillie, tomato, ladies finger, beans (chowli).
We had some excess Ginger so we buried a small piece (about an inch). Within 6 weeks it yielded about half a kilo of Ginger.



It was actually growing in our curry leaves pot so I had to remove it w/o damamging the roots of the curry leaves.

Pudina (mint) is something we always have in our garden, and when it grows in excess we have pudina chutney.

The procedure is simple.
Wash and dry the pudina leaves and mix it with grated coconut, small onions and garlic. Wrap it in Banana leaf and heat it over a pan. Once cooled, grind the whole thing in a mixer. Delicious and healthy.



Oh yes then there is a papaya tree growing in a sack !! Not that we are expecting to see papayas hanging there one day, but its nice to see a tree making a humble effort to grow like a normal tree. The tree helped me in giving our son a quick practical lesson that the stem of a papaya tree is hollow, absolutely hollow (something he did not know) You can use it as a pipette or as a snorkel. (simple information like these are always handy)

Vanilla (a creeper) is growing wildly and unless it is pollinated manually it will not yield the pods. So we just allow it to grow like a decorative plant.
Tulsi (Basil) is another medicinal plant that we always have and I add a few leaves while brewing my morning tea.

Curry leaves is the one which baffles me. It neither grows nor dies. I think it does not like the idea of growing in a pot. (they need lots of soil I suppose)
Once upon a time we had these round chillies which when ripe, was good for tadka.

Talking of chillies, the world's spiciest chilli, Bhut Jolokia is grown in Nagaland / Shillong.
It is interesting to note how the spiciness is measured.
It seems Scoville Scale is used to measure the ‘hotness’ of a chilli.

Originally, a solution of the pepper extract is diluted in sugared water until the heat could no longer be recognised by a group of five tasters. It was the degree of dilution needed that designated its place on the Scoville Scale.
For example, a sweet pepper has no capsaicin and therefore no detectable heat even when undiluted, resulting in a Scoville Heat Unit (SHU) rating of zero. The fearsome Bhut Jolokia, on the other hand, had an SHU rating of 1,001,304
No wonder it costs 400 rupees per kilo.