my favorite things

Thanks to facebook, I now have a new (budding) hobby-- farming! (No, not the Farmville/Farmtown kind of farming--but real actual farming--with only a jar of water and a few vegetable scraps.

Started with chopping off the root end of my celery. Got a jar that's short and narrow enough to hold the root up (a small Chiz Whiz jar or a Nutella jar would be ideal) and filled it with fresh tap water until the entire root area is submerged.

I placed the jar in a place inside the house where the sun shines. Left it overnight.

The next day, voila! Something fresh was growing on top of the celery's chopped surface! Amazing how quickly it grows in water!

I kept the celery in fresh water for three days (everyday you will have to change the water and drizzle a little water on the growing little stub on top) until I planted it in soil. Unluckily for me, some rodent crept in during the night and prematurely reaped the benefits of my (not-so) hard labor-- it ate my fresh growing celery off the pot!

Lesson learned: if you veggie-eating pests lurk around your home, keep your plant where they can't reach it.

Will try this again soon!

My next effort was this:

Since the price of garlic in Manila has drastically gone up these days, I thought I'd try to grow my own garlic at home. (Take that, you capitalists!) I used a plastic canister and held up the garlic clove (flat end at the bottom) by cutting a hole in the middle of a plastic lid, just small enough for me to be able to insert the little clove into it.

The next day there was nothing. I had thought my little experiment failed. So I considered it done and didn't even bother to change the water for the next three days.

But then, on the fourth day, I found a little surprise waiting for me when I checked the garlic clove and saw little flesh roots crawling out of the flat bottom! Aww! I was delighted. The garlic took four days, but the roots seem healthy enough for transplanting.

I made a shallow hole in the soil and planted the clove. And made sure that the rodents wouldn't get to it.

I was so encouraged by this little progress that I planted two more garlic cloves in water just this morning:

After some googling, I learned that this process of growing plants in water is called hydroponics. I'm just using this process as a startup, a less "messy" way of orienting myself with serious gardening. The plus side is that I can easily monitor my plants (because they're indoors, as compared to when they're planted on soil outdoors) while doing other things, and that I noticed they grow much faster in water because the nutrients in the water are directly absorbed by the plant.

Hydroponics is also a space saver, which is important for people living in the city (especially those in condominiums, apartments, or small houses). You just need jars and glasses of water conveniently lined up somewhere (as compared to big bulky pots of soil)

According to this guy, here are a few more veggies you can grow from scraps and easily in a jar of water:

Immerse the roots / white end:
- leeks
- spring onions
- lemon grass
- scallions

Immerse the roots:
- lemongrass

Immerse the roots / bottom end where roots are supposed to be:
- romaine lettuce
- cabbage
- bok choy
- celery

Chop a portion and immerse with the budding part facing up:
- ginger

If you’re looking for an easy plant to grow indoors Ginger is the one for you. Just take you’re a chunk of Ginger from your kitchen scraps and place it into the soil. Make sure the newest buds are facing up. Unlike the other plants we’ve talked about so far Ginger will enjoy filtered light rather than direct sunlight.

Soon enough you will begin to see new growth sprouting up out of the soil, and under the soil roots will begin to sprawl out into the soil. After the plant acclimates to its new home you will be ready to harvest the next time you need Ginger. Pull the entire plant out of the soil and cut off a the pieces you need, and just replant it like you did initially.

As an added bonus for you Ginger makes a great house-plant. Even if ginger isn’t your thing as far as cooking goes you can still get some aesthetic value out of the plant.

Chop in 2 inch squares and immerse with the "eyes" facing up
- potatoes

Taking potatoes from produce back to growing is a great way to keep more waste out of the garbage. You can grow any variety of potato you like, it should just make sure the scrap has ‘eyes’ growing on it. With a potato that has a strong presence of eyes you can chop it up into 2 inch square pieces. Make sure each piece has 1 – 2 eyes. After you’ve cut your potato into pieces leave them out in room temperature for a couple of days. Leaving the pieces out allow the cut surface area to dry out and become callous which will prevent the pieces from rotting in the ground.

It was always cool when i was a kid, seeing celebrities in the flesh. Back then they were apparitions who'd come down to earth, straight from the boob tube/big screen heavens, and the moment--which I would consider a once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity--always had to be documented in a photograph/autograph.

Now that I'm in an industry where working with celebrities is part of the job, it's easier to look at stars as ordinary people. Living extraordinary lives, yes, and getting bigger paychecks, but otherwise, normal folk who also use the toilet, brush their teeth, sweat under hot weather, get flak from directors for screwing up lines, etcetera. Some of them are unbelievably nice, some of them are grouchy under stress (and when they are pushed to work late). The spoiled, the silly, the down-to-earth, the bitchy, stars come in different shapes and varieties when the cameras are not rolling, but take away the makeup, costume, Belo surgery perks, the money, the limelight, they're just ordinary people like the rest of us.

Here are some candid pictures of celebrities from my digicam: