We've had some very heavy rain these few days and I haven't managed to get any decent photos of my garden until today. I wanted to do my LUT Garden Report before I go away to HiveFest next week.
I've been looking forward to my Chinese cabbages growing this month. Despite the slugs eating a lot of my produce, the Chinese cabbage have done very well. As they grew, I noticed they didn't look like Chinese cabbage, and they had prickly hair on they leaves. I picked a few leaves and blanched them and they tasted more like mustard greens. This was confirmed by google afterwards 馃檭 That's annoying! But it's ok, it's still edible, in fact the few leaves that I blanched tasted really nice, maybe coz it's from my own garden.
A week later I noticed caterpillars had started to invade my garden and they were pooing and laying eggs all over my plants. The mustard greens had grown quite tall and when I peeked inside, it was full of green eggs. Ewwww!!! 馃あ It looked horrible. Although I was very proud of their progress, the sight put me off from eating them so I decided to discard them. It was sad to let them go, but at least I know how to grow them next year.
This is a much happier story. In my previous LUT Garden Report I mentioned my broad beans plant suddenly started to grow again after laying dormant for 2 months. On the 18th August it was smaller than my hand. Today, less than 3 weeks later, it is still quite short, probably about twice the height of my hand and it has 3 full grown purple beans and more on its way!!
Talking of beans, I was given two broad bean seedlings this month. They are the two on the right in this photo taken 3 weeks ago. I have sprayed neem oil on them, and all my other veggies, but the slugs have still been nibbling away. This week we've had a lot of rain and suddenly they've grown a lot in the past couple of days. Not sure if they will produce beans.
I was also given a couple of pumpkin plants. One didn't make it, and one is still thriving. This little baby was 4 weeks ago.
And this is from today. It's starting to grow a lot of flowers, who knows, maybe I can enter the Hive Pumpkin World Championship organised by 
I'm very happy with the progress of my wolfberry plants. They've done very well this month, you can see how much they've grown. I think I can harvest my first batch next week by cutting some stems. That will help them to regrow and become more busher.
I'm still trying to grow some bak choi because the bugs keeps on eating them all. I've decided to keep them under a net now but I noticed it's not 100% foolproof as I can still see some flies inside. At least the bok choi seems a lot healthier than when they were uncovered. You'll notice I've set up an irrigation system that runs along the entire raised bed. I won't have to worry about my plants when I go away to HiveFest next week.
And finally my tomatoes. They didn't produce much fruit till last month, I think that's quite late in the season. We're at the end of the summer now and I don't know how much longer it will take for the tomatoes to ripen. I've cut off a lot of the leaves and the top part of the plant so the energy will concentrate on growing the tomatoes.
Likewise for my four other younger tomato plants. There are only a handful of tomatoes here, I doubt they will come to fruition. If not, I will be quite satisfied to know at least they didn't die under my watch.
LUT Garden Report #9 will follow next month. It will be interesting to see the progress with me being away for two weeks.
I remember a while ago 
