"Winter"

January 2013.  Going to Sydney and Brisbane in our summer, their winter, made me realize that my concept of our cold season in Hong Kong in terms of the herbs was all wrong! This is the problem with having grown up in the tropics! So I realized that with our relatively mild winters, I should be thinking of this time of year as the growing season not the dormant season. I realize too that looking back on my blogs from a year ago that this was the time when the eggplants and tomatoes were all fruiting, much to my surprise then. Sadly I have given up with those veggies as the amount of space they took up on my balcony in proportion to the amount of fruit they produced was not justifiable. They also looked rather unsightly most of the time. So I decided to major on herbs....

Part of the thinking was also to major more on the S E Asian herbs which are harder to find in HK. However for some of these herbs, the cooler weather does not suit them so well... It's particularly the occasional freezing winter monsoons which howl through which take their toll on the gingers. The normal ginger in particular does not tolerate that well so I've had to "hide" it in a more protected location.

The turmeric also suffers somewhat with the edges and tips of it's leaves drying out very easily in spite of daily misting.

The same happens with the finger root and sand ginger.

The Galangal leaves get a bit battered by the strong winds too but the pandanus this year seems to be doing much better than last year - probably because it's in a much more healthy state and I'm taking more care to keep it well watered and fed as it doesn't have much soil in comparison to its size.

The chilli plants seem to be flourishing and having produced a lot of fruit back in November, are now finally ripening.

The young lime plants (Thai, limau kasturi or calamansi lime, kaffir lime or magrut) also seem to be thriving.

The curry leaf plant was doing extremely well at the end of summer, so much so that I decided that it needed a bigger pot - big mistake, it turns out that these hardy looking plants do not like to be re-potted and show their disgust by dropping all their leaves!! So the very healthy thriving plant now looks very sad.... Having read recently that they do best with hot dry conditions and given it's current state, I decided to bring it indoors so it can recover properly... Thankfully, it is now producing new shoots...

The laksa leaf plants (daun kesum) seem to be growing better in the cool weather than in the summer heat, which was a real surprise to me. I thought they would be tropical heat lovers.

New additions
My ginger collection gained a bunga kantan plant late summer which is now doing pretty well with lots of new shoots even if some of the top leaves have been dried out by the cold blasts. Hoping that they will eventually produce their coveted flowers buds.

Also found a lemon balm plant a few weeks ago.