That day I followed my wife and mother-in-law picking some little bitter gourds and cassava leaves in the farm. I took few photos of the plantation around that 40 sqm land. We did not walk around the whole area, just to a section where bitter gourd plants growing on the ground, and the cassava plants.
The bitter gourd plants. It's not easy to pick up for the fruit. They are well-hidden, we had to search for them.
Cassava plants.
Ducking to find the bitter gourds.
The bitter gourds are quite small so they were hard to find. The leaves hide them quite well, and the fact that their color is green making them hard to spot.
Gotcha! I found one.
When the fruit are ripe, they are much easier to find because their color have changed to yellow. However, we don't consume the ripe ones, only the young bitter gourd. We still picked the ripe ones to get their seeds we might plant them later.
The ripe bitter gourd.
let's get a closer look.
After searching for half an hour or so, we finally managed to get some bitter gourds. We did not think we could find more of the bitter gourd, even we tore the farm apart. So, we were just happy with what we got, plus we also had some cassava leaves for our dinner that evening.
My wife and mother-in-law, later, went to the kitchen to prepare the bitter gourd and cassava leaves. It's nothing fancy, they just steamed the vegetables and prepared coconut "sambal" to serve the bitter gourd/cassava leaves. The steamed rice, sambal, and steamed vegetables were a great combination for our dinner that evening.
On side note, we put away some of the seeds from the bitter gourds to plant. More plants means leas time for hunting bitter gourds, because there will be many of them growing.
The plan is to plant these seeds.
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