Gardening with Wilson

Yesterday marked the third day of the Singapore Garden Festival (SGF) and it started with me meeting up with Richmond and Lily at Little India. We then visited Tekka Market to hunt for some interesting vegetables for showcasing and educational purposes in the Green Culture Singapore booth at Suntec City Convention Center where the Festival was held.

I found two interesting vegetables on sale in the makeshift Tekka Market. Both were cucurbits and I intuitively knew the first one was a bittergourd relative, which I have subsequently identified as Momordica foetida while another was probably the ivy gourd, Coccinia grandis. I thought the latter might have been Trichosanthes dioica?

The stallholder told me that the fruits of Momordica foetida are most commonly sliced thinly and cooked with fish. The identity of this fruit was based on the morphological description of the fruit given in Aluka:

Fruit long-stalked, fleshy, ellipsoid, orange and dehiscing into 3 valves, 35–68 mm. long, 30–50 mm. broad, densely and softly spiny; spines fleshy, pointed, somewhat recurved, 7–13 mm. long, without an apical bristle; pulp scarlet, surrounding the exposed seeds at maturity with a sticky bright-red, sheath. Seeds brown, oblong, 10 x 6 x 3 mm.; testa sculptured, 2-grooved at the margins.

Another fruit that I bought was probably the ivy gourd. The search for its identity was a lot tougher for me. Its identity was found via the crudest way possible – via pictures posted on the Internet and I found there are two lookalikes – the ivy gourd (Coccinia grandis) or pointed gourd (Trichosanthes dioica). Hope someone can tell me more!

 After all the grocery shopping had been done at Tekka Market, we made our way back to Suntec Convention Center. At about 2 pm, I hosted Wilson Ng, a radio host from Mandarin radio station, Radio 1003 where I then brought him around the SGF and introduced him to the various exhibits on both the fourth and sixth levels.

After a quick, two hour long tour, we headed for the radio station at the Singapore Press Holdings located at Jalan Toa Payoh. The radio show about the SGF started at about 5 pm and we chatted at length about the various exhibits we saw at the Festival.

Halfway through the show, I found myself succumbing to the fatigue that had been accumulated over the past several days. My thought processes kind of slowed down and my mouth also did not cooperate with my mind and I found it somewhat difficult to convey my thoughts in the spoken form.  

I just hope that the radio show went well.