Gardening with Wilson

This afternoon, I was at the Possibility Room of the Central Lending Library to deliver my third Mandarin gardening talk. It was part of a series of four gardening sharing sessions that focussed on the growing of edible plants. This was the first time that our gardening talks was held at the Possibility Room which was a comfortable and spacious venue that had a nice ambience. There is a beautiful tropical-themed garden in the courtyard located just next to the room.

Unlike the previous gardening talks that I have given, the room was probably only half-filled. Although the participation rate might seem rather disappointing, I thought the turnout was quite good considering the talk was not publicised in the newspapers. I saw quite a number of returning participants and one of my members from the Green Culture Singapore discussion forum, Richmond, came to support me. He even brought along his parents who had earlier visited my community garden at Serangoon North. One of the kind gestures of Richmond did which warmed my heart was to wear both the CIB and GCS collar pins on the sleeve of the Polo T-shirt he was wearing.

I touched on five main topics in the talk this afternoon. Four of them, namely, composting, mulching, watering and fertilising, were closely related to one another because compost can be used as mulch and a source of nutrients for plants. Mulch as layer on top of the soil can help to retain moisture at the plant’s roots and can help to reduce the need for frequent watering during hot weather. For audience who attended the talk, they should have noticed much emphasis had been put in by me to be environmentally friendly and we can recycle our kitchen and plants for use to make compost for use in the garden.

Because I have spotted some non-Chinese participants among the audience, I decided that I need to deliver the talk in both Mandarin and English. Giving bilingual talks can be quite a challenging task and I actually took another additional half hour to complete the talk but I hope I did it well enough to be able to benefit everyone. 

As usual, after every gardening talk that I had conducted, I got mobbed by the audience with their many pressing gardening questions. It has always been a pleasure to be able to help and give some advice to solve their problems. But as a result, I took up even more time and that would bring about some delay to the closing of the venue by the library staff on duty. My sincere thanks go to the library staff for bearing with me! Today was a weekend afterall!