Moving on from my Sunflower post, I thought i'd just do a little display of the other things I somehow managed to grow.

As a quick refresher, I had very limited resources due to a strict lockdown for months, and had to use a plethora of improvisational ideas and innovations in order to get things thriving. For example, I had no access to pesticide or fungicide or any such thing, and the only fertilizer I had was a tub of slow-release pellets which I bought randomly about a year before for some reason.

Ultimately, my yield was... cute. I managed to get about 30 peas, a small bag of long beans, 5 or 6 potatoes and actually quite a lot of cherry tomatoes. Nonetheless, I was immensely pleased. Just picking one bean and hearing the snap as you bend it in half... so much satisfaction.

Peas and Beans

The earliest results came from peas and beans, which I planted pretty early spring and they grew pretty fast. Pea plants are pretty short-lived in general, so they came and went entirely during lockdown. Alas, I hadn't got nearly the room or infrastructure to support them, but I managed to improvise some structural support with some big sticks I found in the compound I was locked into, as well as using the elastic straps from covid masks I had lying around to bind them together, or dangle loosely for the cool pea tendrils to grab onto.

The beans came a little after but they grow pretty differently, using their whole stem as one giant tendril which, once it finds something to grab, twists itself around and loops all the way up. I had 3 which managed to grow about 6-7 feet tall and were mostly trouble free, though I did have to keep encouraging them to go up the 'right' way so they didn't get trapped on my clothesline.

Nothing a bit of blu-tac, electric tape, stretchy string, sticks and exposed powerlines can't fix!

Ultimately they grew really well under the circumstances. 10/10 for effort on their part!

Tomatoes

As the sunflowers started to end their lives, the tomatoes started becoming the centre of attention. I was so hyped to see the first flowers, the first tomatoes, the first ripening! So many steps of interest...

And it turns out I had the seeds of the type of cherry tomatoes which grow throughout the season, rather than a single yield. Indeterminate or determinate, I forget which. But this meant, if they were still being taken care of, they could still be producing a ton of tomatoes even now.

However, by the end I simply had to take what I could and freeze 'em for a special occasion. My last day at this apartment I managed to pick a whole bag! I... begrudgingly... gave them to my landlord as a thank you gift. Something I regret deeply. Nothing the landlord did wrong. I just really, really wanted that bag of tomatoes. Well, I still have enough for myself to make a pasta sauce or something.

It turns out, when they're ready to be picked, they pretty much let you know by being so loosely connected to the plant you can just grab them and they pretty much come right off. Then again, people eat them green and claim that's pretty amazing too.

By far my favourite thing about growing the tomatoes though was simply touching the plant. Running your hands along the leaves, the tomatoes themselves, its scent will land on your skin, and it's such a strong smell, one I was convinced was closer to mint than tomato it was so fresh. And, after a minute or so, the smell just evaporates off you. I brushed my hand around literally every time I checked on them. Which was a lot because... Lockdown gave me little else to

This is the huge bag I sacrificed out of a stupid human act of kindness. Blah. Should be me eating those!

Another awesome thing about these tomatoes is how resilient they are. They succumbed so by far the most issues compared to any other plant. I mean, who knew plants could get sunburn?? On top of that there was fungus from rain splashing back soil, bugs, watering issues and even collapsing under their own weight. I once again had to use the straps from masks and tied them up to the exposed power cables to keep them propped up. However a couple of branches did end up collapsing fully in half, leaving them permanently wounded.

AND YET, by binding those broken parts together for a few days and keeping them in place, they managed to heal up and keep on growing as if nothing ever happened, if not for the obvious massive hole in the stem.

Scars heal but never go away.

Potatoes

This one was one of the first I attempted. I managed to get a special potato pot pre-lockdown, but it outgrew that quickly. During lockdown I had to improvise further with some polystyrene crate things and some tape to keep it growing up to its potential. The potatoes also succumbed to disease and was perhaps most badly affected. Apparently it was simply some kind of fungus that arrived, blown across the land in the wind, and took up residence on my potato leaves.

The internet told me to prune basically all the leaves and expect no more growth, and with a high chance that the potatoes too were infected. Pretty dismal.

However, I left some leaves and a few more actually grew back. by the end, the one potato I casually threw into the dirt without cutting, peeling, preparing in any way, ended up producing 5 or 6 more of itself! Not nearly as much as the photographs implied by the merchants selling me the potato pot, but still. I felt like a kid on Christmas day digging through and finding the potatoes.

I made a nifty Chinese side dish with 'em, among other things:

Chilis

These were the latest Addition.

Around the middle of lockdown, one of the hardest things to acquire were chili peppers. They were in high demand at all times, and really low supply, since you could only get them through community efforts while the government were constantly cracking down on 'illegal' food rations.

I asked my building neighbours and one had a small bag, of which I only asked for a single one. He obliged and socially distance dropped it off at my door.

I took it and the seeds and without doing anything special just plonked them all in the soil and tried to see what would come from it.

Lo and behold, chili plants!

It turns out far too many were growing so I simply had to remove all but the strongest looking early on, and I left myself with 7, and then whittled down to 5 as I had to move apartments.

I went through a lot of stressful taxi journeys taking a whole ton of luggage, plus one chili plant each time, back and forth until I had all 5 with me, and they are still here on my bedroom windowsill today!

Apparently, the bottom corner of the balcony underneath the sunflowers meant they didn't get the amount of direct sun they needed so they're a bit 'leggy', I've been told. So I cut the heads off 3 of them to encourage lower more bushy growth, and I let two of them just do their thing. It'll be interesting to see which ones do best.

A beheaded chili growing as if nothing even happened

It was interesting to note that only one went into brief shock, lost a couple of leaves, but the others started going black at the joints. This is another way they express their displeasure at being moved to a totally new environment, from a kinda-shady corner of the outside world, to a full-sky window, indoors.

Weirdly nothing to worry about here

that being said, they are clearly growing better now than they were before.

The chilis are all I have left of my time as a gardener in my old Oasis apartment. Hopefully I'll end up with more than I can eat. They have so far been absolutely trouble free, and if I do end up stuck in China longer than hoped, they should last around 3 years as perennials!

Well, that's it for now. Eesh, Just starting to realise I have so much mundane life stuff to express for no particular reason. Forgot this platform even involved crypto...