The Kitchen Garden

One of the best thing about having a large garden is that one can have a kitchen garden.

Most herbs and spices are not needed on a daily basis, neither does one really want to spend money on a whole bundle of the herbs as sold in the market just to use a few leaves, etc. So there is a great sense of satisfaction that one can just go to the garden to get the ingredients required for some specific dishes.

Freshly picked from the garden - how many of the herbs in the tray can you recognised?

There are basil, coriander, mint, kaffir lime, spring onion, lemon grass, pandan, curry leaves, mugworth (ai ye) and sand ginger (cekur). We also have ginger and tumeric in the garden.

Of course, considering that we have some twelve bushes of of it - no Asian kitchen garden can be considered as being complete without the various types of chilli pepper. Today's harvest can be seen in the tray ... the longest chilli pepper being some 17 cm (7") long.

There is the normal chilli, a larger variety of the chilli padi and the pyramid chilli. We also have the really hot bell chilli and other varieties of the chilli padi. The bell chilli seems to be a bit more difficult to grow but we have two small plants doing nicely now though still some way from producing the fruits. The plants are producing a lot of chillis and we cannot consume the bulk of the harvest. So every few days we just dispatch a whole bunch to the employees in our wholesale bakery supply centre. They love them!