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Singapore: Home-grown harvests

Mr Richard Ashworth and Madam May Lee with a 20kg winter melon from Cosy Garden, a community garden in Bukit Batok. St Photo: Wong Ah Yoke

He also has 150 cultivars of mint, some of which have an unexpected smoky or chocolate flavour.

By Wong Ah Yoke
Straits Times
Aug 23, 2020

Excerpt:

The National Parks Board (NParks), which encourages the community to enhance the environment through plants and gardens, also fanned the flames of the growing movement by sending out free seeds under the Gardening With Edibles initiative from June to this month.

The initial plan was to send out 150,000 packets of seeds for vegetables such as kailan, cucumber and lady’s finger. But the response was so overwhelming that they were all taken up on the first day. More were added and, by the end of this month, 400,000 packets will have been given out.

NParks has been sowing interest in growing edible plants for a long time by providing support to community gardens around the island. Residents adopt plots of land for free in these gardens and 80 per cent are used to grow edibles.

In a huge nursery in HortPark off Pasir Panjang Road, where many edible plants are cultivated for the country’s parks and gardens, a small number are earmarked to be sold at its Gardeners’ Day Out event, where workshops and bazaars attract hordes of hobbyist gardeners.

NParks also runs an Allotment Gardening Scheme, where people can adopt a 2.5m by 1m raised planter bed for three years at $57 a year and receive gardening advice. The planters are found in 12 parks, including in Ang Mo Kio, Bedok and Clementi, and are fully subscribed.

Read the complete article here.