City, Garden Stories

Garden Stories: Suekay of Urban Agriculture

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I enjoy my catch-ups with Suekay, sometimes I pop by her Bishan residence to talk about collaborations, where the garden offers a wonderful backdrop to our discussions. She lives with her in-laws, who have created a lush, pretty garden with the help of a gardener. It has quite a neat, unified, formal appearance, with mainly ornamental plants. There are plans to introduce edible plants in the near future, which is exciting to hear. As you’ll see, I couldn’t resist getting a little snap happy on the garden… It’s such a beautiful, relaxing space, I feel like I’m visiting a resort each time I go there.

I’ve known Suekay for a while now and I love her warm personality and down-to-earth approach to everything she does. She’s very driven with her online gardening supplies business, Urban Agriculture, which retails a range of gardening products including seeds, microgreen kits, fertiliser and soil enhancements. We have a working arrangement where I list seeds and worm tea on her website. On top of running Urban Agriculture, she looks after NONG (by Edible Garden City)’s retail operations.

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She made a transition from the financial sector to go full-time into promoting urban farming, a profession that she finds a lot more joy and meaning in.  Here she shares her motivation on making a career switch, and her journey so far. If you find Suekay familiar, you might have seen her in a previous post on her beekeeper colleague, Thomas Lim.

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City, Garden Stories

Garden Stories: Bhavani Prakash, the Mindful Gardener

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A few weekends ago, I paid a visit to my dear friend, Bhavani Prakash, who lives in the West Coast, and I was looking forward to seeing her inspiring rooftop and balcony gardens again. Bhavani hosted Ginny Giovanni (pictured above) and I for tea that rainy afternoon, and gave us an unforgettable experience of not just lovely treats, but also a tour of her garden spaces, and the condominium’s community garden, which she helped initiate.

I met Bhavani years ago through work in the sustainability field, where she is very active in creating and inspiring change. She is a strong advocate for green living, connecting to nature, and mindfulness, she raises awareness of these meaningful topics at corporate and individual levels through speaking at conferences, and by providing coaching and training. Bhavani is well known for her environmental advocacy website, Eco WALK the Talk, and sustainability and thought leadership platform Green Collar Asia. More recently, she has been conducting Mindfulness at Work training with The Potential Project. As busy as she is, she manages to be a hands-on, nurturing mother and gardener, and does well at both.

She has been able to grow a variety of fruit, herbs, vegetables and ornamentals on her balconies, including sugarcane, bananas, sweet potatoes, peanuts, winged beans, purple beans, mustard greens, watermelon, custard apple, mulberry, moringa trees, frangipanni, among others. Bhavani also makes her own compost which she uses for her plants.

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Country

Music of the Plants!

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So much evidence around us show that plants are sentient beings with an awareness of its surroundings, and this is further proof that this is so. Crystal Castle has brought in technology from Damanhur, an eco and spiritual community in northern Italy, able to convert plant vibrations to music, and today it was demonstrated during a sharing session how different plants can make different beautiful sounds and interact with its surroundings.

It was a very popular talk, and lots of children came along for the experience.

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The synthesizer above, is rigged to plants, and as the speaker shared, plants hear themselves for the first time and are surprised at their own “voice”. During the session, she also mentioned research that suggests plants react to birds chirping in the morning, rather than the sunshine, which I thought was quite interesting.

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City

Take a look inside Singapore’s only national nursery

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On Saturday, NParks (National Parks Board) opened its Pasir Panjang Nursery to the public for the first time, and I went down first thing in the morning with mom in-tow to view their 12 hectare growing space. I loved what I saw.

I especially love its vast expanse of space and plant life, including flowers, vegetables, fruits, ornamentals, trees, and aquatic plants. There were also bees and other pollinating insects flitting about from flower to flower.

The tour seemed to go by quickly, even though it went for an hour and a half. The guide shared lots of interesting details about different plants, and the session was highly interactive, where we got to touch and smell various plants and flowers.

He shared that aquatic plants, including water lilies, sit in this storm water surge canal pictured below, and helps purify water that runs through it. In times of heavy rain, lots of sediment gets washed into the canal.

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