Growing vegetables in Singapore

When I was growing up in the countryside, my aunt who lived next door, grew all kinds of vegetables in her sprawling farm. Grandma used to stand in the fields all day with a hoe (changko), manually ploughing and tilling the soil into beautiful fluffy beds for planting.

When I moved back to live with my parents at the orchid farm 7 years ago, I was again surrounded by commercial vegetable farms. These are huge farmlands with rows and rows of glorious vegetables spanning across acres of fertile land.

So it is no surprise that sooner or later, I'll start growing vegetables of my own. However, when I started reading up on vegetable growing in Singapore, I couldn't find any information on the internet. There are millions of webpages on vegetable growing in temperate countries, but why the shortage of information about growing vegetables in the tropics like Singapore?

That inspired me to set up this blog to share my vegetable growing journey with fellow gardeners. I'm growing vegetables in my patio (which apparently is larger than my living room) using planter boxes. When dad found out I am planting vegetables, he started ploughing the spare land in his farm to prepare for my expansion! Indeed, he is a better gardener than I am and I'm sure he will have more success than me. The race is on!

I wanted to be eco-friendly in my pursuit, so I'm using paper-pulp egg trays to grow my seedlings. One of the advantages of using paper trays is when I'm repotting them, all I have to do is tear out a chunk of the tray and plonk it into a planter box or flower bed for the next phase of growth. This will reduce the trauma to the young plants and eliminate root damage.

To ensure the seeds sprout properly, I've used a good soil-based compost. Indeed, every single seed that I planted sprouted nicely.

Here are the seedlings after 5 days. That's kang kong on the right and kai lan on the left.

I transfered the kang kong shoots into a styrofoam box which is great because it is light and portable, and it retains moisture and has lots of drainage holes below. Here they are 3 days later. Vegetables grow well in porous soil with good drainage. I used a mixture of black volcanic soil, fine sand and normal gardening clay.

It has been 20 days since I sowed the vegetable seeds (kai lan, chye sim, spinach, kang kong and lettuce. They're growing rather well. I'll post more photos later. I also sowed some carrot, tomato and egg plant seeds thereafter. The carrots are growing so well now.

The initial growing process is probably the most trying period because the sprouts are so delicate and difficult to handle especially when transfering them to the planter box.