… make lemonade.
The Curious Gardener fell victim to a malicious hacker on Friday the 13th. The experience was decidedly a sour one, but we’ve turned it around by taking the opportunity to rebuild and give the site a facelift. If you missed us, we missed you too! If there are still any glitches around the site, sorry – we’re working to get things running smoothly as soon as possible. We’re just glad to be back! 8)
Sunset Hibiscus flower
How can this be called a hibiscus, I wondered, looking at pictures of the Sunset Hibiscus after someone gave me some seeds for it; it looks more like an oversized okra flower! Nevertheless, I was game to try growing this new plant. You know me and my penchant for growing plants from seeds…
And it was fairly easy to get these seeds to germinate. Once sprouted, they went into small, temporary pots until they could be transferred to a 16cm pot. Those went out in the garden to get full sun.
The plants grew to about 30cm before they started budding. I was again bemused when I saw the flowers, because they really look like big, floppy okra flowers! The only similarities to hibiscus seemed to be the shape and size.
Sunset Hibuscus fruits look like stunted okras!
After the flowers finished blooming – within a single day – fruits followed. Again, I had to compare them with okra, because the Sunset Hibiscus fruits were like really short, stunted okra fruits. Just look at the picture! They’re even segmented the same way, as I discovered when I broke open a dry pod to look at the interior.
Like okra plants, the leaves, fruits and stems of the Sunset Hibiscus plants are covered in short, prickly bristles. You have to be careful when handling them.
Sunset Hibiscus flower buds.
And, as I always do, I started doing more research on the plants after they had gone through the first cycle of growing and fruiting – it makes growing the plants an adventure when you’re not sure what to expect! What I learned was that the proper name for this plant is Abelmoschus manihot, or Aibika as it’s called in Papua New Guinea. They grow it for the edible leaves, which are apparently high in leaf protein, iron, potassium, magnesium and calcium. That sounds pretty nutritious to me!
From what I read about the uses of the plant:
Young Sunset Hibiscus
The Sunset Hibiscus is a perennial and grows best in tropical and subtropical regions. Put it in a sunny spot with rich, moist, well-drained soil and it will be happy.
More info:
© 2011 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.
How wild can a sweet potato patch grow? Very! That's almost knee-deep in the current patch. I only walk through with garden boots on 'cos you don't know what's hiding under there!
Sweet potato plants take up a ridiculous amount of space. I indulged my curiosity about growing them and concluded that I wasn’t willing to spare the real estate for them. So, in February, I started removing one of the two patches growing in our garden to make way for other more productive edible plants.
I remembered reading somewhere how it’s good to leave parts of the root system to decompose underground, to add organic matter back to the soil. By right, it should decompose and be reabsorbed into the soil, right? So I wasn’t particular about removing all the roots, once I’d checked for sweet potatoes.
The developing sweet potato that I uprooted. Looks like a carrot.
I sure didn’t count on what happened…
Those bits and pieces of root that I left behind started sprouting, and new sweet potato plants have been popping up all over the place!
The funny thing is, when I uprooted one of the new sprouts, guess what I found? A forming sweet potato! Is this following the same principle as my mango tree, as in when the plant is threatened, it starts bearing fruit? Huh…
The moral of this post: When clearing a sweet potato patch, dig up everything! If you’re not committed to giving it space and time, don’t start growing them at all.
And if you’re getting rid of them, strip the leaves off the vines and use them as mulch/compost. There’s no point in wasting that good, organic material. Remember, though, that the vines are resistant to being composted – they’ll simply start growing new roots and leaves. Just throw them away after stripping them, or pass them to someone else who wants to try growing sweet potatoes.
The little sweet potato rootlet has been transplanted to the side where I’m trying to ensure it doesn’t take root anywhere else so that all its focus goes into developing that slowly swelling root into a potato. By hook or by crook, I’m going to tell you one day that I’ve eaten at least one sweet potato that I grew in our garden! It’s just taking longer than I thought it would. 
© 2011 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.
Singapore forever under construction...
You know, Singapore is such a built-up country that many of us forget that once upon a time, it was just an overgrown little island that teemed with jungle life. My parents remember when creatures like iguanas, monkeys, river fish and turtles, flying foxes and *shudder* snakes were not uncommon. My own memories of “wildlife” include the thankfully rare occasions when there was a snake somewhere in the neighbourhood, and green tree lizards and huge garden spiders lived in the big trees, and when we made games out of catching grasshoppers and ladybugs – because there were more of them then. My favourites were tadpoles that we’d catch and keep to watch how they developed into frogs and toads. However, already at that time, Singapore was steadily rolling towards taming the wilderness and modernizing everything, and we began to see less and less wildlife around, and started to lose touch with nature.
So, now that I’m trying to get my head out of all the tech and re-balance myself with nature, I take great delight in discovering which creatures have managed to adapt and live among all this urbanization – and one of the creatures I’d never thought to find in our garden was a squirrel!
Yes, a squirrel.
Something had been agitating our dogs for a few days and we’d heard movement through the trees, but were unable to spot anything. Then, one evening, I saw something moving stealthily through one of the Peacock trees. It was a long, black shape, and rather than go nearer and scare whatever it was off, I used the camera to zoom in and see…
It's a squirrel hanging upside-down while eating!
It was a squirrel snacking on the dried pods on the Peacock tree! We don’t know where it came from, but it liked running along the garden wall and moving noisily through the trees, jumping from one tree to another to get where it wanted to, and even climbing up the house and going over the roof to the other side!
Plantain squirrel resting high up in a palm tree. What gorgeous colours, eh?
After several days of coming and going, I finally managed to get a decent photo of the entire creature, and from there, determined that it was a plantain squirrel. While it was skilled at moving through the trees, it unfortunately didn’t know enough about crossing roads. Less than 2 weeks after it arrived, it became roadkill. 
This was in early 2009, and every time I hear loud rustling and crashing through the trees, I wonder if it’s another squirrel visiting. Would I want a lot of them around? Probably not, especially with all our tempting edible plants growing. Besides, the novelty would wear off if there were too many of them. For now, though, it’s nice to know there’s still some original fauna still around in our Garden City. 8)
© 2011 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.