Our Home Garden Tour

MCO can be a bore for many of us and for most, this is the reality we find ourselves living in for almost the past year. If you're working from home or taking ODL like I did last year, it can feel draining just being disconnected from your usual routine from being outside. 

My parents, especially my mum, has a different idea and she remedies this isolation syndrome by transferring her energy and time to working on the garden. Both my parents have green fingers. Everything they touch seems to come to life and it shows when you step in to the garden and see the results of their hard work. I would want to say I have a bit of this "gift" too, although I've never harnessed my full gardening abilities as they have. Whatever it is, their garden is amazing. It's like living in a surrealistic little white cottage surrounded by a beautiful, colourful garden. 

Award for Best Garden Maintenance Worker goes to Abah

In fact, our garden is in full bloom as we speak, lots of things are ready for harvesting or flowers in their prime blooming phase. Some of others are slowly nearing the end of their season too. We figured, perhaps you'd like to see how the garden looks! You might even get some ideas to have your own garden or include new plants to your collection. 

If you're interested to have some seeds directly from our garden, you can get your hands on them for a super, out of the world price tag here at our Shopee store: MySecretGarden

🌿 Walking through the Garden 🌿

When you first walk into our garden, the first thing that will likely catch your eyes is the huge flower bed of zinnia across the neatly clipped lawn. There's flowers after flowers of pink petals, and the occasional bright red (our favourite and the most rare), yellows, whites and oranges. They have their "seasons" as we call it. After they've bloomed and die out, they'll spread out their seeds and the baby ones grow to replace the older flowers. The cycle continues like that. 

To the right, there's an almost hidden cosy corner for sitting back and relaxing, while having breakfast and enjoying the view. In the early mornings, you can have a little sunbathing moment (getting that Vitamin D) here while watching the garden slowly come to life. You might even catch a glimpse of our shy neighbourhood cats peeking through the gates around the garden or from behind a bush.

🌿 What Flowers We Have 🌿

I can never list out the entire inventory of flowers we have in one introductory post about our garden. There are just too many, some that were grown intentionally and others who just choose to exist by themselves. However, I can definitely show some pictures of our shining stars that really brighten up the space.

Zinnia Flowers

These are the most abundant out of all the other flowers in our garden and they thrive freely all year round. Since there are just so many of them, we take a couple of bunches inside our home every few days to be put in vases to brighten up our rooms.

Cascade Rose

Roses take a while to grow and when they bloom, it's only for a couple of days or weeks at a time before they wilt and die. However, these cascade roses can last for yearsss with minimal maintenance involving pruning. They're absolutely precious and tiny!

Sunflowers

Sunflowers are my mum's favourite flowers in the garden. And like the very Sun itself, it radiates this cheery mood to all who sees it. I find it really adorable when you can see the head of the flower peeking above our gate whenever we come through the driveway, as if its greeting us home. They typically bloom for around two weeks before the flower heads start to droop, petals turn brown and the seeds look more distinct. 

The proudest gardener of them all: my mum!

Button Flowers

Once upon a time, these flowers used to flourish as lavishly as the zinnia. During their full bloom, they were bright, pink-purple bobbing flowers dancing in the afternoon wind, and really amplifying the English cottage-vibe of our garden. From afar, they could be mistaken for lavender flowers. But with recent "invasion" from unwelcome pests like giant-sized grasshoppers feeding on its leaves, their numbers have dwindled dramatically. We're trying to bring them back by keeping a closer eye out for mean grasshoppers from munching on the new shoots.

Roses

Okay, other than the sunflowers, roses are my mum's classic fave. Especially the ones that have a fragrance to them like these ones below. If you're peeking out the window that faces the garden in the early mornings, when you can smell the morning dew and mist in the air, you can catch a sharp sweet scent of the roses too! Not going to lie, it smells exactly like the milder version of The Body Shop British Rose Eau De Toilette perfume.

🌿 The Edibles in Our Garden 🌿

I would say that we have a somewhat balanced portion of plants that function as accessories/decor and edibles. Other than the flowers, we also try to prioritise our space for growing our own fruit and vegetables. The result from this effort is we get to save hundreds of ringgit a year from shopping fresh produce because almost everything required for cooking/eating is available right here in our garden. Our family love eating fresh ulam and vegetables, which previously, takes up a lot of our monthly shopping budget.

Here are some of the currently most consumed vegetables we have in our garden.

From left: Pucuk paku (fern), green chilies, mulberries, cherry tomatoes, guava and kacang botol (winged beans)

Pucuk paku for dinner!

Young papaya fruits. We recently took one to make somtam as our appetizer (green papaya Thai salad)

Our first harvest of bananas!

    

Guavas close to being ripe for eating!

Mushrooms

Pak Choy

Scrumptious cabbages

Sweet red mulberry

🌿 The Wildlife in Our Garden 🌿

And because our flowers are eye-catching to the human eye, bees are affected the same way too! We have lots of friendly bees buzzing around the flowers early in the morning and a few dozens throughout the day. There are even butterflies and other cutie bugs around too. They're all our little friends who help  our flowers and plants to pollinate, reproduce and generally keep them healthy.

Friendly buzzy bees

These red ants are fierce (if you have experience of being bitten by them before, you'd know) but they are the absolute BEST at keeping pests and mean bugs away from making our plants sick.

Butterflies make our garden feel ✨pretty✨. Other than the flowers who do a great job at beautifying the overall look of our garden, they also help to pollinate our flowers. On the not-so-bright side, they're the very pests we hate when they're in their baby caterpillar form because they eat a lot. However, we do try to have a mutual relationship with nature, kind of like a give-and-take agreement, "They eat some of our produce in exchange to keeping our garden happy". It works!

Miss/Mr Ladybug

Meet Albert! He's one out of the many stray cats who love to stroll around our garden.

Our cat, Leo in his walking vest and sniffing around nature ~

🌿 From Garden to Kitchen 🌿

Here are some pics that we took ourselves that show how our garden produce can become appetizing meals!

🌿 We Sell Our Garden Seeds Too! 🌿

Our garden has flourished so much within the short time that we moved in just two years ago. Many of our friends and relatives have gained inspiration from our fruit and vegetables crops and flowers. We sell some seeds directly from our garden to MySecretGarden for others to start gardening as well!

Thank you so much for reading this personal post till the very end! I have one more post planned about how we recycle our kitchen waste and how our garden benefits from this initiative which you can try out too. And in the meantime, take care, stay safe. I'll see you in my next post!