Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Hanging Gardens @ Admiralty Primary School

Recycling is one of the widely encouraged practices for green movement in many schools. One good example is shown by Admiralty Primary School which makes use water bottles as a holder for putting potted plants. Not only will this beautify the wall but also cut down the carbon footprint in the school.
Many students helped in the process of collecting waste water bottles.

Members of The Environmental Club created some holes at the base of the water bottles to drain out excess water in the bottles. This will make sure that all these bottles will not become a breeding ground for mosquitoes.Here comes the first step in getting the bottles up on the wall. Fishing lines were used to attach to the hooks on the wall, leaving sufficient length to tie the water bottles up the wall.
The teacher in charge, Ms Faith Tay, also worked hand in hand with the students in attaching the fishing lines to the water bottles.









Next, they estimated the distance between the first bottle and the hook and then tied a knot to the water bottle's neck.If hands were not sufficient to tie the bottles, you could use your legs as well - what a creative idea ! Pull tight to secure the bottle to the fishing line. Repeat the process for the next bottle until you have the required number of bottles hanging on the line.

Using a cable tie, wrap it round the base of the bottle together with the fishing line. This should ensure the bottle standing in the upright position.Put in a potted plant of your choice. If the area is shady, put in a shade-loving plant like fern or money plant. If the area has full sunlight throughout the day, then a sun-loving plant like portulaca grandiflora is suitable. However, the media used for planting the potted plant should have a 50-50 mixture of coco-peat and soil.Trim off excess fishing lines or cable ties to improve the aesthetic look.The process is repeated until the whole wall is covered with all sort of bottles.Students working meticulously and enthusiastically ........
The last job is watering the plants. After watering, a final inspection is necessary. This is to ensure that there is no water retention in any of the water bottles.Through this project, the students not only learned that unwanted things can be recycled into something beautiful. These young pupils have shown that teamwork is the best way to get things done in the shortest possible time.Let us take a group picture to remember days of hard work done and teamwork enabled us to complete the tasks with great satisfaction.


This is just an example of recycling unwanted items. Hopefully this activity could trigger the imagination of many of the young minds to embark on carrying out another recycling-reducing and reusing of wastes project.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

VIPs' Visit to Oh Farms

The weather was finally sunny after a few days of daily showers - a perfect weather to welcome some VIPs including Mr Lee Yi Shyan, Minister of State for Trade and Industry and National Development to the farm.
Their first stop was to view our unique Dynamic Root Floating (DRF) System greenhouses. There are about 200 such greenhouses producing 6 types of leafy vegetables and 10 types of culinary herbs.
Kang Kong (空心菜, Ipomoea aquatica) and chinese spinach (苋菜, Amaranthus dubius) are just 2 of the common types of local vegetables the Farm produce daily. When introduced, our guests were gamed enough to eat both the vegetables raw - fresh from the greenhouse as the Farm does not use any pesticide in the process of growing the vegetables.
Another system that we introduced to the guests was the NFT - The Nutrient Film Technique system. In this system, the Farm grew some cucumbers, roselle, cherry tomatoes, lavender and a few species of mint.Some of the guests tried the freshly pick cucumbers from the vine. The fruit plants and aromatic herbs are just some plants to showcase how versatile hydroponics can be. Not only leafy vegetables can be grown without soil, big plants like roselle can also be grown using hydroponics.Lastly, hydroponics aggregate culture - the drip irrigation method was also introduced. The Farm used this method to cultivate spearmint (留兰香, Mentha spicata).



The last part of the tour, a good sharing of how you can grow your own vegetables and culinary herbs at home using hydroponic method. Besides vegetables, ornamental plants can be grown hydroponically. One of the advantages is that, should you need to go for a short overseas trip, you need not find a nanny for your plants. Simply add enough water to last till you come back.On behalf of the Farm, Mr Ore, our Managing Executive thanked for their visit and bid farewell to them.