Expert Advice On Edible Garden Treats (Part 1/3)

Garden of Refreshment
Quench your thirst with delicious beverages and desserts taken right off your little plot of green

By Wilson Wong | Photos by Koh Boon Wei | reprinted with permission from Home Concepts magazine
Thanks to Hortpark for the venue

BESIDES beautifying our surroundings and purifying the air that we breathe, the plants that we have at home can also provide us with food and medicine. Here’s a selection of four edible plants that are easy to grow in the garden for their rich source of phytonutrients and health-enhancing properties:

The Passion Fruit
Passion fruits are popular dessert fruits where the pulp is eaten fresh, together with the seeds, or blended to yield a refreshing beverage.

Passion fruits are rich in vitamins A and C, potassium and dietary fibre. The purple passion fruit, botanically known as Passiflora edulis, is the species that is commonly grown here.

The vine bears round to egg-shaped fruits which turn purple when ripe. It also produces very attractive, large, white flowers with purple centres.

The passion fruit vine, which needs to climb on an outdoor trellis, loves direct sunshine and soil that is moist, well-drained and fertile. Harvest the fruits when they turn purple and wrinkles have appeared on the rind. New plants can easily be propagated from stem-cuttings.

Apartment gardeners who wish to have them at home can also try growing a small vine in a large container under a sunny spot.
The Dragon Fruit
Dragon fruits are borne by cactus species that belong to the Hylocereus genus. Hylocereus undatus produces red-skinned fruits with white flesh while those of H. costaricensis have red-skins and red flesh. Hylocereus megalanthus is rarely encountered locally and has white flesh with a yellow skin.

In general, ripe dragon fruits are sweet and low in calories. It is said that the fruits of H. costaricensis are particularly rich in vitamin C and other antioxidants, as well as fibre, phosphorus and calcium.

Look out for the large, showy and fragrant flowers of the dragon fruit plant as they open for only one night.

The dragon fruit plant loves the sun. It is large and adopts a sprawling habit and must be given a strong support outdoors to grow on.

New plants are most easily propagated from stemcuttings and prefer to be grown using well-drained and fertile soil that is enriched with organic matter.

In general, ripe dragon fruits are sweet and low in calories

Click here to read about the Aloe Vera

Source: Expert Advice On Edible Garden Treats (Part 1/3)

Zouk’s Fashionable Flea & Easy

Caution: The cheap buys featured below may cause extreme jealousy
by Mavis Ang

Zouk’s quarterly flea market “Flea & Easy” took a different spin last Sunday with a fashion elite edition (along with Singapore Fashion Festival ‘08), where all the stall vendors belonged to the fashion industry. Amongst which are stalls owned by Cleo, Harper’s Bazaar, Channel 8 actor Chen Han Wei, modelactress Jade Seah, and radio DJs Shan Wee and Rosalyn Lee.

Within an hour, Zouk was packed with usually glamourous fashionistas jostling and squeezing their way through the crowd. A small queue gradually formed at the entrance as people stopped to look at stalls, holding up traffic behind them. After straining our necks and grumbling, my companion and I managed to step into the flea market, only to be stunned by the sight before us.

Read more about Zouk's Fashionable Flea & Easy.

Know Of A Diaper Cake Baker?

34-year-old Siti Mariam shares some secrets on being in the baby gift business
By Mavis Ang

DIAPER cakes have been around for more than a decade, but only gained global recognition when Carrie presented Miranda with a huge blue one for her baby shower in the TV series Sex and the City.

These non-edible cakes are made up mainly of rolls of diapers, and are usually adorned creatively with towels, bibs, baby shoes, stuffed toys. They are popular baby gifts at baby showers — a Western tradition where friends of soon-to-be-parents get-together and present the couple with gifts for their baby.

Read more about Diaper Cakes.