New Goats

We got two new goats! And white ones, at that. Alas, one of them has been slaughtered to feed schoolchildren in Batangas. But, the younger one remains.



They are curious and cautious creatures.

Urban Greenery

Here is a link to my other blog about a little urban garden I chanced upon by the train station in Sta. Mesa. I couldn't decide where to post it, but I had to decide.

Goat Updates, Flowers, and Rain!

The rain was strong today! It was frightening. It's around the same time of the year as Ondoy, and I'm getting anxious because things can grind to a standstill again, a whole metropolis paralyzed, cold, and relatively hungry. Cross fingers, catch the water that you can, stock reserves, plant.



But I have to say that the garden looks great! It gets so lush around this time. In particular, a clump of cogon grass that we have not been touching is huge! About three times taller than me and flowering. It is a source of amusement outside.

Our goat is pregnant, and her stomach is moving. She is really about to extrude a baby, and I'm really excited. The rain is complicating things, because they hate getting wet, and their shed cannot protect them from side sprays. We were thinking inside the house, but what a mess that would be.



This is the dude and he loves katuray:



And things are flowering! I don't remember so much color during rainy season.

Cannonball Tree Encounters

So I've fallen behind with updating this blog, although so many amazing things have been seen and happening. I've yet to upload all my photos from Singapore, but one good thing that came about was actually seeing a cannonball tree in Fort Canning. Here is a picture of Fort Canning, indeed a beautiful place:



I had seen a cannonball tree a couple of years ago outside a temple in Cambodia, and it wasn't fruiting so all I could do was look in wonder at the flowers. They grow very weirdly on gangly branches straight out of the tree's midsection, and they are large and beautiful.



This year, my father brought a gigantic fruit home (I believe it was from a cemetery), and kept it around the house. It was an oddity and we identified it as the cannonball fruit. After a bit of time, it started emitting a weird smell. Kind of fetid, but actually, not unlike something we Asians would still eat. After awhile, the odor became overpowering, and the fruit was voted out of the house. I had every intention of planting it, but I guess I forgot about it. It decomposed somewhere in the garden. Cross your fingers about it germinating.



In Singapore, I reached out and grabbed a small fruit. It by no stretch of any imagination resembled a cannonball. Maybe it could pass for a potato, or an airborne ube. In any case, I left it on my brother's drawer. After awhile, it began to smell, so I wrapped it in clothes. That didn't work and the towels all smelled funny, so I put it outside his window.

One day, coming up his building, we saw my fruit on the landing of the stairs! Quite miffed, I returned it outside the window. Later on in the day, I heard my brother's landlord talking loudly outside and it was quite the funny moment when he realized I was actually keeping this Thing, which he had attempted to throw it out (on the landing, responsible citizen) thinking it was rubbish, only to come up later on and find it back by the window.

At the moment, it is resting inside a pot at home, waiting to germinate. I shall soon split it open to see if there is even any seed inside, considering I picked as it was very small.

Singapore Fungi

I had fun in Singapore. Now, is that shocking? Most everyone says Singapore is as boring as a day at the snail races, but I appreciated the plants and the company. It's a breakthrough in my consciousness that I can be in a tropical urban setting and feel like I can breathe deeply.



Here are some pictures of fungi at Fort Canning and Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. Incidentally, I recently "forgot to return" a book (written in Singapore) to a restaurant in Makati about tropical fungi. So probably a visit later this week back to this post will yield identification data.

Pasyonaryang Mabaho Flowers

Remember the Passiflora foetida? It had flowers, as I mentioned, and here were some pictures I failed to post because I was too busy. The above picture is the flower, already about to close up. It's only open in the morning, and then it curls up, getting progressively less attractive and more alien-like.



A closed-up flower, with exposed sticky bracts. Those are the ones that get insects stuck and eaten by the plant.



A fruit in progress:



By the way, after having extensively smelled the plant, I conclude that it wasn't stinky at all. It had a bitter smell, kind of what you expect a potent medicinal to smell like. Mildly pleasant even. Silly plant-namers.

Higad Time Again

Thanks to this blog, I've been able to track "seasons" in the garden. Higad season has been happening constantly from July-September, and they are munching away right now! Here are some photos.




Eating my nice Ilocos cotton seedlings, among other things:

More Flower-Nose, and New Garden Inhabitants

A bit after I posted about sesame flowers looking like noses, and some other flowers (Gmelina asiatica) used in Indian texts as nose references, the great website Indi Journal (which documents indigenous Philippine trees and plants) posted about Gmelina philippensis. I grew excited as I was greeted by a photo of a similar flower. The photo below is from Indi Journal.



On a related note, the rains are prolonging the harvest season of sesame. I know why they plant them for summer harvests. They aren't going to be ready anytime soon.



Okay, so we have two new friends in the garden: a male and female goat! Our grasscutter is perenially ill, so we have decided to procure some friends to eat their way around the area. This makes the transfer of plant matter to the soil much quicker (in the form of fecal matter), and is a better option than using gasoline to cut.



The female is, in the meantime, tied up. The male goes free. Before you draw up any parallels and raise a protest banner, this is just temporary, until they get their bearings. We find the male on top of strange things. They are not doing a very quick job of eating the grass (as you can see above), but we are so happy to have them.

They are still scared of people, with the female warming up faster. We've been feeding them a bit of salt everytime we give them water. They have been eating our sweet potato plants. As you can imagine, I am awoken by the confused rooster (citylights messing his instinct up), and all day listen to bleats, barks, tweeting birds.

Sesame (Sesamum orientale)

A number of friends would know that, for many years, I'd had an intense pining for a linga or sesame plant. This was the only plant I lacked to complete the backyard diversity song for gardening, the "Bahay Kubo" (that version sounds like prepubescent zombies singing).

Sesame has a special place in my heart, not only because it is delicious and the source of hummus' tahini, but because it marked my interest in ethnobotany, plant history, etc. Like many of my most favored plants, everyone uses it, but nobody really knows how the plant looks.

Let me start by saying that sesame flowers resemble beautiful people's noses. At least, that's what ancient Indian texts referring to dieties say. Some moving verses like:

His beautiful eyes are just like reddish lotus flowers. They are most beautiful, just like lakes of Krishna Prema. His nose is arched and is resplendent just like the sesame flower. (Referring to Sri Chaitanya)



Whose nose, that is beautiful as a sesame flower, is adorned with a round pearl. (Referring to Radha, the female pictured above)

Hindu references to gods with noses like sesame flowers (tilottama) spread out further into South India. Investigation into these phenomena reveals that in South India, the Vijayanagara Empire began to exhibit preferences of sharp noses, with metaphors abounding refering to ellu poo or the sesame flower. (In contrast, the preceding empire favored round, wide noses, with their flower of favorable nasal comparison being that of the kumizhi, bloom of the Gmelina asiatica). Honestly, the flowers look similar to me!


Sesame flower.


Gmelina asiatica flower.

And the practical, perceivable relationship that sesame has with beauty are many in a few cultures. Ayurveda recommends daily oil massages for health and beauty, and so on, and so forth.

But anyway, the plant.

The plant is amazing. Mine started out as little black seeds which I procured in an adventure to Ilocos. I almost lost them, breaking the clay pot that held them, but thankfully, I was able to take some home.



They were smaller than the typical sesame seeds, and still covered with the black layer that signals viability to plant. Jimmy mentioned he planted a whole field of them so his mom could make the molasses-sesame delicacies she sells in the market (and those were amazing as well).

They progressed to unassuming little seedlings, as I suppose everything does:



And one that I coddled in particular boletd to a potentially overpowering plant with pointed, coarse leaves. It's come to resemble a hydra, aggressive stems reaching out of the netting I wrapped around one plant box to dissuade the chickens from having a salsa party inside.



I read somewhere that the leaves could be a potherb (food), but I find them to be a tad bitter. Of course, that hasn't stopped any major culture for utilizing leaves as nourishment. The flower, that thing compared to so many divine noses, smells like tahini. This is strange, as I wondered if my acquaintance with sesame paste makes me unable to say that the flower is fragrant.





Now thse fall off and give way to pods, green and supple. Mine aren't nearly ready yet to be harvsted, as sesame has sort of a long yield period. I don't mind at all. The pods will dry out and the sesame will start rattling inside. This attribute, which makes sesame perhaps viable as a musical instrument for small mammals, has led to a string of names meaning "echo". These begin with Arabic jaljala and move on to Spanish ajonjoli, Hindi gingli (another term aside from the more common til), and Portuguese gergelim.

In the meantime, I sacrificed a few pods to examine the freakish assemblage of sesame seeds waiting to coat themselves in black.





So how did this thing end up in my garden? Apparently, it was domesticated in the Indian region several centuries BC. I guess they reached the Philippines pre-Spanish period. The predominant Malaysian and Indonesian words are bijan and wijen, respectively. I imagine one syllable bearing resemblance to another from the Hindu gingli-- though I admit it is a laughable stretch.

Old attempts to dictionarize the Malay language show the Javanese word (and current Filipino word) as linga. Thailand calls it ngaa, and Laos, man nga. I have read it written as hei chih-mah and hu ma in Chinese. I'm positing that via.

So yes, it's getting late, and like my "harvest", this is an open-ended story. I will update further on the progress and how I end up using the plant. Til then, think of the plant whenever you eat hummus or things from your local Chinese restaurant.

Rain

It's that time of the year-- mushrooms are starting to crop up and tadpoles are in my rainwater catchment.

In the Philippines, we only have two distinct seasons-- a dry one and a wet one. Things aren't very confusing that way. I heard on the radio that our weather bureau defines rainy season as one in which "it rains everyday for five consecutive days". We are squarely in that department now, bring out your rain boots.



The very pronounced feelings of the citizenry is that rainy season has been, so far, a repose from the almost biblically apocalyptic summer heat. However, there is also widespread fear after last year's disaster-- this one conforming more to the universal archetype of how the earth tends to swallow us all every ones in while-- Ondoy, internationally known as Ketsana.



So what have we learned since last year? How can we be welcome the season with open arms? I've been ruminating on this the past few days, as rainfall has become more constant and a little bit scarier everytime. The trick is to think calmly, as nature puts water where it thinks it should be, as we see where we can store and allow water to flow.