taking down notes 10.24.12

Aside from tending to my garden, I also do research to check on things I can do to improve my garden. But really, I just like to read a lot, about gardening and things that interests me in general. Here are some links to blogs and pages that I really enjoyed reading, hope you will find them helpful too:

No to Aphids

lady bug

My tomatoes, pomelo and basil are all attacked with aphids! Everyday, I check and spray them with diluted dishwashing soap. However, monsoon has come and my efforts would just be washed away by rain. So I came across this very helpful blog about lady bugs/beetles. These helpful creatures are voracious aphid eaters... so now, off to finding lady bugs.

Tomatoes and Weight Loss

When I started my edible garden, my first plant was a tomato because I've read that its easy enough for beginner gardeners (still am a beginner, though). But here are more reasons to love tomato and much more reasons to plant more tomatoes. Weight loss, fighting diabetes and cancer, yes to all those, from tomatoes!

Just a winged bean

winged bean, after all

Now this one's funny. There is some veggie that my family loves to eat. In Cebuano (a dialect in the Philippines), we call this veg, garabanso. A friend gave me some seeds of this veggie a few weeks back. Tough luck, this friend didn't know a thing about growing the plant but just wanted to pass on the seeds. The seeds are now germinating, the cotyledons are starting to fall off as true leaves started growing. I had to research fast so that I would know how to take care of this plant. But you see, this is a bit frustrating.  Researching, especially on the internet, would mean finding the correct English/American name of the plant. I started with looking at google images of Philippine vegetables. (Because there is no easy Cebuano to English Plant Dictionary yet... hmmm.... now that might be a good idea!) There were some pictures that looked like the garabanso and the label would say bitsuelas. The research didn't end there, because it is not bitsuelas, not Garbanzo beans. I continued looking at images of vegetables, until (finally! thank you!) I found the google image above which lead me to this blog. Sigarilyas in Fipino and it's Winged beans in English. That was it!  Now I can finally get a good night's sleep. 

Here's a little something to enjoy, a foreigner singing a Filipino nursery rhyme about the simplicity of provincial life in our country