herb and flower basket

Baked a vegetarian chocolate cake for a friend’s birthday.  Decided to be creative and decorated  with herbs and flowers from my organic garden. Note the serai wangi (citronella leaves) at the back, the beautiful red double layer petals of the hibiscus in front.  Left and right are the ordinary single petal red hibiscus.  Threw in some bunga telang (blue pea flowers).  Informed my girl friend that only the serai, hibiscus and  blue pea flowers can be used to make herbal tea drinks. The rest of the flowers are just for decoration purposes  only.

Mien Kum – thai appetizer

Planted a few daun kaduk outside my house and now it grows wild all over.  Many neighbours are seen harvesting the daun kaduk.  Besides the daun kaduk, the mango ginger, lime and chillies are from my organic garden.  Once you start eating this, one will find it hard to stop.  no need to stop as it is a very healthy appetizer.

Foo Shearn’s drawings

30 -05-2009.  OMNI’s Educational Fair.  In the Art competition FS’s T-shirt painting  above  won him the 2nd prize in his age category.

26-3-2009 :  The Official Opening of the Dyslexia Association’s Ampang Head Office.  FS presenting his drawing  to the Queen of Negri Sembilan.  FS drew a sketch of  the intricate wood carvings from the Negri  Sembilan’s Palace.

8 June till 11 June 2009.  The famous artist Yusof Gajah taught 20 dyslexic kids at the Ampang Centre (sponsored by SHELL during the June holidays) how to draw and paint. A real hands-on experience for the kids (especially FS who only sketches with pencil) and they are proud to show off their paintings as above under the artist’s guidance. Yusof Gajah is on the right. The kids paintings will be incorporated into SHELL’s calendar 2010.

 

18-7-2009: Art Competition (Festive Seasons) sponsored by La Farge Cement. FS drew Santa Claus and it was a foregone conclusion that he will win in this category as can be see below.

The judges arranged the  4 winners accordingly: Hari Raya, Deepavali, Christmas and Chinese New year. As can be seen above, FS’s  Santa Claus was  chosen as the winner. Unfortunately, he was disqualified as he drew his Santa Claus in Portrait style and not Landscape as required.

It was a lesson for him -  to listen and abide by the rules in any competition. Nevertheless, the Judges gave him a consolation prize for his effort.

Bio dynamic farming (Qi farming)- 20 June 2009

My organic ‘kakis’ were invited by Mr Wong to visit his farm in Bukit Tinggi one Saturday for a ‘compost qi’ course. This course is to start at 9 am till 1pm. Being avid kitchen gardeners the session dragged on till 3pm when we adjourned for lunch. There was so much to discuss and exchange amongst us- the die hard organic people.

We learnt a lot from Mr Wong – making our own lactobacillus, composting, wormiculture etc….   To top it all, he taught us a few qi-gong exercises so that we can cultivate our qi and pass this qi to our plants and environment.

We felt invigorated in his farm,  feeling all the good positive vibes (qi) that has never been felt in any other farms that we have visited.  This farm is truly beyond organic farming.

We left with red wrigglers (earthworms)  to start our own wormiculture. We also brought back papayas and loads of information to convert our small kitchen gardening into a bio dynamic garden.

I am now practising my qi exercises.  Also started my wormiculture with 2 boxes of worms – one the red wriigglers and another box of worms from my own garden. I have already sprayed the whole garden with my qi lactobacillus made from Mr Wong’s recipe. Look forward to more fruits from my >30 fruit trees in the garden now that i am giving them the extra ingredient “qi”

Singing at Brickfields temple- 28June 2009

KKBC’s choir has been invited again by the Brickfields temple to perform during their 9am puja session.

20 minutes was allocated for them whereby they sang songs composed by Wai Leng and other famous Buddhist songs like “Brahma of my Heart”.

We all went early to the Temple so that the kids could practice first.

Having just learnt about qi and the fact that the Bodhi tree is full of qi, i went around the 2 Bodhi trees at the temple. the atmosphere was so cooling and calm.

One of the trees was fruiting and picking up the fruits from the floor, realised that the bodhi tree is actually from the fig family. Only the size of the fruits are so small like our local cherries.

Below is the photo of the small fig fruits as compared to the bigger figs from my place

Figs, called ‘moh fah khor’ in Cantonese literally  means “‘no flower fruit” as this tree does not bear flowers, like other fruit trees.