Garden as a Reflection

and other small updates

Hey folks,

Our garden is often a reflection of the state of our minds, and the beginning of every year is usually time for us to do a reset.

In the lead-up to the Lunar New Year, we have been taking time to do a spatial re-mapping for our studio garden (now coming up to six years in this rental home / studio - how time flies!). We were shifting planter beds around to provide longer sunlight hours for our plants, taking out plants that do not seem to grow so well here, and finally adopting a much larger tank to start a new fish pond -

Thanks to Alika @seedfolks for bringing this over!

With this new mini ecosystem, we hope to attract a larger diversity of insects and have an additional water source for the dry weeks which give not a single drop of rain.

We purchased more soil for this setup and to our amusement, it arrived in a box labelled “fresh tomatoes”.

While resets involve lots of pruning, digging, and germinating of new seedlings, there is also harvesting. We were surprised to unearth decent-sized sweet potatoes growing all these time, relatively unbothered by all the changes happening around them despite being rooted in a tight soil space.

There was bountiful harvest from our mulberry tree from our recent studio workshop where we explored fibres, colours, and foodmaking with just this one plant.

Our favourite was to turn the berries into a delicious tart jam…

and how the yellow dye from the leaves (which can also be drunk as tea) becomes subtle iron-green pigments.

We had really encouraging feedback from our mulberry sharing session (thank you so much if you are reading this), particularly on how the session revolves around one plant, opening up different possibilities. It was a nice opportunity to consolidate what we have learnt, and to share them with others. Quite a few of our participants also left with cuttings from this tree to grow in their own spaces.

A Koel resting on a mulberry branch. Recently learnt that these guys are natural competitors with house crows.

We hope to have more updates soon for you guys, from both our studio and garden.

We are also curious to hear from you, dear readers, how your environment (could be your room, house, own garden, or anywhere else) is reflecting your state of mind, as we come into the new year?

Feel free to leave a comment also. We would love to make this a more interactive space.

Anyway, wishing you all bountiful harvests from resets in the new year.

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Updates:

We moved our online shop to Hitpay, because Etsy fees are getting hefty… You can find it here. We have some new painting kits coming up as well, so do keep a lookout for that soon-ish!

Till next letter,

Liz and Shirin