I couldn’t wait for the rock wall and grading project to be done to start planting up the yard. I decided to grow some bananas along the jungle edge. Six months later, I’ve already harvested my first banana crop, and I’ve got banana trees towering 15 feet tall, swaying in the breeze.
The varieties of bananas here are amazing: there are about a dozen different types available in the market, and they’re all quite different. We’ve got Pisang Emas (Golden Bananas), Pisang Embon (Dew Bananas), Pisang Berangan (Dream …

It is fruit season now, which means all my discretionary income is vanishing at the roadside market. There are plenty of local fruits available year round – pineapples, papayas, bananas – but the best fruits are highly seasonal, available only for two months or so at the beginning and middle of the year.

One of my favorites is rambutan, with their bright red and yellow hairy skins. Rip or twist them open and inside is a thick sweet juicy flesh around a seed the size of …

Last I wrote, my brick and mortar wall was winding its wobbly way to completion. I finished that and proceeded to backfill it with topsoil. Now the only one who can see its flaws are my neighbor. That’s the irony of landscape work: most of the work you do lies buried, the good and the bad. The topsoil here is heavy reddish to yellowish clay with a bit of grit and almost no organic material. The rich dark crumbly topsoil of home just doesn’t …

Great, so that makes about as much sense as nursery rhymes can be expected to make. But what on earth is cekur, you ask? Maybe you’re not all that sure what turmeric is either, for that matter.<

Of all the ways I could choose to fill my spare time, I’ve managed to pick some incredibly tedious, punishing yard projects. It must be from my inherited Polish virtues, a strong back and a weak mind. I intend

Wherever I go, I am always sure to bring my secatuers along. If it was only more portable, I’d proabably bring a spade too. You never know when you will come across a plant for the garden. Institutional grounds are the best places to go, since they tend to have cultivated varities, and noone would miss a little cutting here or there. When I say cutting, I don’t mean chopping a tree down, I just mean clipping a twig or two off a shrub or tree. …

Some pictures of petai, a green bean used in Malay home cooking. It grows in long pods on a very large tree of the Legume family, Parkia speciosa. The beans are very pungent. I’ve most often seen it cooked in sambal tumis ikan bilis, a fried chili paste with dried anchovies. It is also eaten raw dipped in some kind of spicy sambal. A lot of vegetables in the diet are eaten raw with chili sauces instead of salad dressing, a practice known as …

As the yard was being cleared of brush, I came across a few plants of some value that I spared the parang for. The first is a very common seasoning in Malaysian cooking, Lemongrass or serai, Cymbopogon spp. Not surprisingly, it was planted just outside the kitchen door. From a distance it is hard to distinguish it from other grasses, though it tends to form a dense, rounded outline. Sometimes you can make out a reddish-brown tinge near the base. But just touch it …

Our new home is in fact several years old. The house itself is quite nice and liveable as is, but the yard… The yard needs a lot of work. I wanted a house with a lot of land, and I got that in the sense that the area is spacious. But it is missing about 18 inches of soil from the kitchen stoop to the back fence. It is common practice for developers to save costs by skimping on landscape, or even to sell …

In Michigan, where I’m from, we have large fruit; watermelons and pumpkins for example can reach great size. Sensibly, these fruits grow on trailing vines, right on the ground. But imagine a fruit that size that grows suspended from a tree! Aiee! Maybe it’s called Jackfruit because it will jack you up if it lands on you. Actually, the cultivated trees are not that tall, only a few meters, so we’re not really talking Durian kill-factor here. Still, seeing something that size just sprouting …

Marginal Nature
A fascinating overview of the thesis-in-progress of Kevin Anderson, a geography doctoral candidate at UT-Austin. I could spend a fortune tracking down his bibliography. A former philosophy student, he’s able to tackle the big questions, like “what is nature?”, that I only daydream about till my head hurts. He describes his own background that led him to study nature in urban margins:
A rundown railroad town has a wealth of marginal sites where nature reasserts itself and makes a home. Through vacant lots, unpaved back alleyways, neglected …

Detroit and Jakarta Compared
Odd to see these two cities side to side… What inspired that? It’s from the World Resource Institute. I don’t know what can be learned from the comparison; it’s like apples and durians. But the individual profiles of the cities are interesting. Now, if they had compared Detroit and Kuching, my jaw really would have dropped…