The secret to growing a 14.7kg cabbage? Serenade your sprouts daily — that is, according to a group of green-fingered amateurs from Kaohsiung First Community University.
The giant vegetable — 10 times the size of an average cabbage — was grown by a group of 52 novice farmers at the community college who had spent the past year learning from scratch how to grow vegetables.
At a fundraiser on Saturday where the group displayed and sold the fruits of their labors for charity, members of the club said that singing and playing music to their patch of tomatoes, pumpkins, green peppers and cabbages had been key to the bountiful harvest.
Photo: CNA
Club head Yu Shu-yen (游淑燕) told reporters that each member of the club had been assigned a plot of land measuring 20 ping (66m2) to farm after completing 18 lessons on soil, water control, plant diseases and pests, plant selection, and ways to grow vegetables and fruits.
Club members cultivated their crops without using pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
Yu said they played music and sang their favorite songs to the vegetables every day to help them “grow up healthily.”
Speaking of the 14.7kg cabbage that stole the show at Saturday’s event, Yu said that certain species of cabbage normally take four to five months to mature, but this one had been harvested only four months after it was planted.
The cabbage could have grown bigger if it had not been harvested for the charity event, with Yu attributing the size of the vegetable to the “friendly farmland” on which it grew.
“It is the reward for the club’s long-term dedication to the promotion of non-toxic agriculture,” Yu said, adding that the approach protected plants from pollution.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS