October Mini-Garden Update

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My mini garden is a lifeline for all the ingredients I need in the kitchen. When I need vegetables, I need chilies, and my mini garden is my go-to helper. As a passionate cook, it's become my life's work. Gardening and cooking are my two priorities.

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In my previous post, you saw how I harvested cauliflower. I've even processed it into various dishes at home. I don't buy vegetables, chilies, or even other herbs.

This time, I'll show you an update on the progress of my entire garden at home. Many new plants are starting to thrive and are almost ready to be harvested, such as papaya flowers, papaya fruit, and even pumpkins. My sweet potatoes are also starting to grow well, even though I only planted them in a large sack. Hopefully, the sweet potatoes will bear fruit in that sack. The growing medium is only duck manure and organic waste, such as dried leaves.

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The pumpkins in my mother's duck pen are starting to turn yellow, indicating they're getting old. I loved seeing the large fruit hanging above the fence. The fruit was about the size of a football, or even bigger than my head. It was large and beautiful, but they only had three mature ones. The others had all fallen off and withered on their own. Perhaps the weak stems prevented the fruit from growing.

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Besides pumpkins and papayas, there are, of course, many other types of plants thriving here. This includes the tomatoes; they have started to bear fruit, though not all at once, as the fruit is developing from multiple shoots. I deliberately trained them to spread across a bamboo fence that I secured with rope, as tomato plants really benefit from support—their stems tend to become fragile once the plants grow tall and start bearing fruit.

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To control pests on my tomato plants, I grow marigolds—known in Indonesia as bunga tahi ayam. I obtained these flowers from a neighbor who grows them in large quantities; their leaves are commonly used as a remedy for colds and bloating.

My chili plants are now ready for regular harvesting; I usually pick them every three days, as there are always some turning red. It is wonderful that a single harvest yields enough chilies to make sambal four times or even more. Fortunately, chili prices at the market are currently very high; my mother mentioned that yesterday they reached IDR 100,000 per kg—an extraordinary price. Chili prices typically spike during the Maulidir Rasul celebration season, when supplies naturally become scarce.

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I am so happy that, thanks to planting these chilies four months ago, I can keep harvesting them continuously. They don't all ripen at once, so the harvest happens in stages; usually, after I pick the ripe ones, small new fruit buds begin to grow.

The cauliflower I harvested last week had started to bloom; I intentionally delayed the harvest to see what would happen if the vegetable was picked late. The result was that the head wasn't very attractive—the florets weren't tightly packed, and the stalks had elongated.

When cooked, the texture was slightly tougher compared to cauliflower harvested at the right time. In my opinion, cauliflower really needs to be harvested on schedule to ensure it looks better and tastes better when cooked.

So, that’s a brief look at my mini garden this month. I hope to continue growing a variety of vegetables beautifully in the garden. I really love the idea of ​​making the best possible use of the available space at home. I hope this inspires all of you to start gardening as well.

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