Parcel 6 Building A Shed

 Just got news from our new partner that the Land and Mines department are sending their surveyor to resurvey the land soon as we need to settle the land dispute on the border. We quickly mobilize our forward team to quickly build a shed so that the surveyor can have a place to camp for a couple of days. We were also instructed to provide 40 pieces of hardwood, berlian, of about 2 feet long for Parcel 6 and 7 to be used as peg to mark the border. Thankfully we have some fence post of hardwood around and we just cut it to size.

 We sent in out materials, mostly re-cycled to the site which we had prepared when we cleared the land. It is located on the non-dispute lot. We had made a small clearing, enough for a shed and a place to do U-turn for the pick up.We quickly decided to do a shed of 10' X 15' basing on the estimated materials that we have. We start off by marking the foot print and check for squareness. As we only have a ladder, the pick up were also used as one.

 We dug in for about 2 feet to put up the four corner post. We then put up a cross beam to hold the corner post. We made the roof on a minus 1 foot and shall use the roof to collect rain water. The soil at the corner post were rammed tight to secure it.

 We secured more cross beams. Once it's strong enough we can proceed to fix the zinc roof, as we need to go on top of it. Need to "pull" it back as it ran off a bit due to those re-cycled wood, not truly straight.

The roof was then put up. We then wall up the sides with zinc, leaving a door and a window.











The roof gutter was then put in place.










We set up the water tank on some tree trunks as stand.

We had almost finish the shed, which we also plan to use as a storage and temporary shelter when we stay over night here. The minor touch up, we shall leave it till we "move" in. This shed were built without any drawings and just with simple field tools like handsaw, hammer and a measuring tape, on mostly re-cycled material.

Resort De Casablanca.

Mushroom Farm

Visited a mushroom farm. Got access as one of our helper's relative is the caretaker. This place is located at maybe thousand plus meters above sea level. The place is so cooling, heavy fog, just after a rain. We were there about 3.00 pm. Visibility is about ten meters only.

 There used to be three housing for the mushroom, but due to disease, all where dismantled. Now only one was rebuilt. Even with one house, it is able to store a large number of mushrooms. The thermometer reads 19 C. These seedling where bought from a supplier, so the work is just to water them and harvest.






When these seedlings arrive, they have to be unplug, then mist with water. Temperature is cool here due to the altitude. Practically no energy cost as it's natural.

 Different stages of growth.

 Mushroom going to be harvested soon.

 Caretaker had planted some strawberries.

Picture of me taken with a self timer. I guess there is a potential of turning this place into a resort style farm as the place is so cooling and inviting. A cafeteria serving hot drinks is most welcome.

Planting Schedule Chart

Was playing with the Excel and did a simple chart of our planted plants. I find it helps me to visualize better our produce with expected harvesting dates. This helps me to plan faster both for the long term and cash corps.
Am still trying to look for a better chart and was thinking if I can correspond it to the weather, shows progress of growth, that shall be superb.
From the chart I learned that we need to keep planting (cash crops) so as we shall have a harvest later on. Had started to implement this since November.
Not all our new planting are successful. Local soil condition and weather is so crucial.We are still learning through trial and error. With our accumulative experience gained we should be able to over come it sooner.
Organizing our plan for 2012. We have lots to do next year, moving full steam ahead.

Parcel 5 Our Small Farm

Month of December, on set of the monsoon season. Our pool had been filled to the max, had to dig an overflow drain to relieve some flooded area. Algae had grown in our pool as we did not use the water much. The fishes that we had thrown in had also grew in quantity. Bought some fish feeds, but unfortunately all were eaten by the dogs. Have to store it securely the next time. Thankfully we had harvested our green vegetable patch as two raised beds were flooded. Our losses were minimal, mostly due to diseases, insects & predator outbreak because on the rainy season.

Our inter-crop of groundnuts & eggplant to the failed sweet corn is growing well. The leafs of the sweet corn indicate most probably that there is magnesium deficiency here. Was told that sweet potatoes grows well in this area. Am planing to convert this area to plant banana and inter-crop with legumes. Work shall start in stages once we had finish harvesting the present crops here.

Clearing a small area to try planting some seedlings of bottle gourd that we obtained from a friend. Those pumpkins that we planted here did not grow well. Not sure if it's the soil condition or due to the drought. We had since pipe in an automatic sprinkle here. Hopefully these shall do better. Need to set up some fixture for it to climb soon.
Had also planted some banana here. Since it takes about 6 ~ 12 months for the banana to bear fruits, we should be able to harvest the bottle gourd, then do another round of legumes.

 The Long beans are growing well. Shall need to string up in a week or so. We had readied the bamboo pole when we planted the seeds. The bamboo where cut from the wild, not far from our farm. We had only started to use these wild bamboo to save on cost and to reduce waste. Thinking of more uses for the bamboo as they are readily available. Maybe do some fixture for the pumpkins to climb on our later batch.

Or first harvest of pumpkins did not go well. We had some that were eaten most probably by rodents and some were converted to ants nest, due to the rainy season. We only managed about 45 kilos & 55 kilos for the 1st & 2nd batch. Expecting a bigger harvest on the following batch batch. We are keeping all the spoiled pumpkins to be used as seeds.
We are still making changes to our little farm. Have decided to stop the eggplant as the prices had dropped too low and we still had not fare well on this plant. Shall move on to other crops which we have a better experience.
We have at the moment the following crops here. Banana, Chilli, Eggplant, Okra, Pumpkins, Kangkung, Sayur Manis, Mini Tomato, Bentong Ginger, Yam, Papaya, Avocado, Sweet Potato, Sweet corn, Groundnuts, Long beans, Bottle gourd, Jack fruits, Serai & Sukun.

Parcel 1, Measurement & Preparartion For Banana Harvest.

The largest tree at the left.

Did a measurement of our rubber trees at Parcel 1. Taken at 1 meter from ground level, smallest was 8 cm and largest was 16.5 cm in diameter. These are for the grafted trees that were planted by us. All the smaller ones are the survivor of coccidae attack. I would guess that we maybe be slightly below specification. Had taken steps to improve our status. We did another round of fertilization with commercial grade fertilizer, covering the whole area, to the fringe of the Parcel. We had a spray of EM (effective microbes) to improve the soil condition. We had just managed to do this before the rainy season start. On the fringe of Parcel 1, we found the biggest rubber tree planted by our partner before we came in. It's a huge one, estimated to be 35 cm in diameter. How  I wish that all trees are this size, but sad to say, there is only 1. We are trying to access why this particular tree is growing that huge, It was planted about 1 or 2 years earlier on virgin ground (undisturbed top soil). All the neighboring tress are still very thin, thinner than our grafted trees.

We added 20 trees of Berangan Banana at the fringe, near to the site of the abandon shed. There are some fruits trees here. A rambutan, jambu air and a couple of lime trees. We hope to generate more Berangan (higher value) sucklings to replace the current bananas. We also too the opportunity to made some cuttings of the lime tree to bring back to our nursery. Hopefully we can transplant it back to parcel 1 in a couple of months.

There is a rubber tree, suddenly drying off. The upper trees are gone. The tree turns harden, dries off, and decay as dry wood. Do not really know what is happening to it. We cut off the top till the stem had not harden and that still produce latex. Shall monitor this next month. Hope this is effective. This is different from the Dry Bark Disease on Parcel 2. Hope to find out what is wrong and what is the appropriate action to take soon.




Explored the fringe of Parcel 1, there is about less than an acre of land here. Making plans to clear and plan. Clearing may be a bit difficult as it's the rainy season. May have till wait till next year to start work. We have lots of options here, we may go for rubber trees or even fruit trees. As the land here is not terraced and has a good top soil, the potential is enormous. Entering this to the do list 2012 project.

We are almost at the end of the year. The Banana trees planted earlier has bear fruits and we are harvesting. Special thanks to our pioneer co-coordinator. We are thankful that he had shown us the direction. However, we wished we should had planted the whole parcel with Banana. Anyway we are expanding on the Banana and moving up market. Our new planting are of higher grades of Banana, Berangan type. Hopefully we shall have a higher value and grade of harvest soon.


Our first harvest was a failure cause we do not have the experience to check for maturity of the banana, over anxious and harvested too early. We could not sell off our produce, mainly due to buyers rejecting our banana because of maturity. It was a good lesson. We manage to enlist the help of a friend to help us sell off, by using carbide to ripen the banana. We manage to recover only about 30% of the first harvest. Our friend also help to train us to harvest the banana and help us sell off the produce as he has a small stall. As the produce is just starting, and not much, we supply him all our bananas for the moment.
 Once our harvest grows, we shall have to look for a market. We are modifying our processing of banana at site so as to save space & weight on transport. The waste can also be left to compose at the farm, to be reuse as fertilizer. We are learning to process as this is the first time of what we hope to be a regular affair.

A Day At Parcel 6

We started off early as with previous visit as we are doing some rubber tapping. The yield is higher if tapped in the early morning due to the cooler weather (the latex coagulate slower). We can not take it to the max as these are only for trials. Tapping should be done before daylight (anytime after 1 am) and fixed to a regular time. Our helpers also found that we have to make a thicker cut, as opposed to the fine cut. Reason is that we do not tap these trees on a regular basis. I noticed that the leaves are falling for this area. Shall monitor how long it last. Our neighbor at the rear had stopped tapping due to the leave fall, they had turn the collection cup over to prevent water storage. We had a higher yield than the previous visit.
We had finished planting banana trees for the half lots. Today we planted more than 100 banana trees. Hoping to have a bounty of harvest. With a combined harvest, we hope it shall be feasible to ship it to the city for a higher value.

A check on the ground nuts shows goo results. Estimate maybe more than 90 % germinated. Ground nuts required low Nitrogen fertilizer, otherwise it shall form less nuts. We applied Chicken dung this time as we want the vegetative growth first, also we did side dress with a higher dosage as most probably is the only time we are fertilizing it.

Could only find 4 pumpkins germinated from our second seeding. Wondering what gone wrong wrong.
Check on those first seeding, was surprise that we found more, some had just germinated, having only 2 to 4 leafs. 
Am suspecting that the seed are hibernating and would not germinate due to insufficient moisture / water. This area did not experience much rain lately. Another option, we could try germinating, and transplant, buy with no water at site, the new plants might die off due to drought. Guess we shall wait for another 2 weeks to see if we have more germinates. In the mean time, planning to try other crops like Field Corn and Sweet potatoes, which are more drought resistance. Shall also source for more ground nuts seeds as we had ran out.

This parcel 6 is particularly windy. Most of the rubber plant-lets are blown side ways. Beginning to stake the plants but ran out of strings. Shall have to continue on the next visit. We need to straighten the plants so as to have a straight and clean trunk. This shall provide a bigger tapping area.
Hope to see better results on our next visit.

Our Little Farm

Our extended water holding pool.

One month had passed. We had settled down and are working at full steam. All of us are in very high spirit. Just had a meeting and was happy to announced that we had manage to trim down our monthly expenses and had a slight increase in gross income. Still working to achieve our short term plan of arresting negative cash flow, end of February.
Our daily operation is running smoothly. We normally start off at 7.00 am with watering, follow by harvesting and transplanting. Later part of the day are mostly for maintenance, fertilizing, preparation and etc. Ending the day at about 5.00 pm with another round of watering.
Had already finished off transplanting all the green vegetables. It has freed us from working on a too tight daily schedule and kept us from planting off the full four acres. We should see more progress this month.

Uneven germination of F1 sweet corn.

We had lots of issues in October, after the changes. We had water supply problem, due to the dry weather. We had insects / predator attacks. Soil and plant disease,  some we had solve, some still pending. Our trial plot of brunching onions failed miserably. Only a few managed to germinate and all failed to grow. Our new planting of F1 Sweet corn 45 & 55 days), half failed to germinated. We had planted ground nuts to replaced those that failed to germinate. We had also replaced those died off brinjals (Phytopthora) with pumpkins. It was so hectic like fighting fire, here & there. At least now we can have a breather.
This month we are trying to plant bitter gourd, Ash gourd (F1 early mature new seeds from supplier) and some Bentong Ginger (courtesy of Joseph).

Pumpkins on raised bed and replacement for die-off eggplants.

Our first batch of ginger was harvested and we managed only 35 kilos of harvest. We made a lot of mistakes on this first batch. Biggest mistake was using too 'hot' a fertilizer and it almost killed off the whole batch. We are grateful that we still managed 35 kilos. We also harvested late as we have to wait for those almost died off plant to rejuvenate and the good ones are already too matured. After harvesting we had free up some land. Half had been germinated with Lady's Finger (okra). We had planted some left over shoots and the Bentong ginger on raised bed, within watering range this time. Shall see how it perform.

 Some of the Sayur Manis (Sue Jia Choy) have started to grow. We hope to grow more of these as there are low maintenance and provide regular harvest, even if it's on a lower price.

Did a trial run of Carbonized Rice Husk. It was 'simply' built with whatever that was available from scraps. Managed 2 batches, then the rain started. Shall stop until the rainy days are over.
Rice hulls are composed of 20% inorganic materials and 80% organic materials. The organic fraction of the rice hull includes cellulose and hemicellulose (50%), lignin (26%) and other compounds such as oil and proteins (4%) (de Souza et al., 2002). The high concentration of lignin in rice hulls impedes decomposition processes (more than 4 months) and reduces the bioavailability of the remaining organic components of the rice hull. Biological lignin decomposition is primarily an aerobic process carried out by fungi. The production of carbonized rice hull has been identified as an appropriate method for circumventing this problem. Carbonized rice hull is a crucial ingredient of bokashi organic fertilizer and can also be used in composting toilets and animal bedding. Carbonized rice hull results from the incomplete combustion of rice hulls under high heat and low oxygen conditions (pyrolysis). Pyrolysis causes the decomposition of organic materials such as lignin and cellulose, leaving a residue of carbon and mineral nutrients. Breaking down the lignin accelerates decomposition of the rice hulls and the subsequent release of nutrients. When Carbonized rice hull is incorporated in bokashi organic fertilizer it provides a carbon source for microorganisms to balance the high nitrogen content of the manure. Carbonization conserves the physical structure of the rice hull which provides a colonization site for beneficial microorganisms, contributes to soil permeability and water retention, and improves aeration of the soil. Carbonized rice hulls also contain nutrients such as potassium, phosphorous, calcium, magnesium and other micro-elements.
Stay tune for more news on the second half of the month.

Parcel 2, What A Surprise.

Parcel 2 is one of the least visited Parcel, due to accessibility. The only remaining vehicle (purely 4X4 only) access, is that we have to go out back to the main access road, travel further up, then turn into a primary road. Road condition is purely for 4x4, and if it's wet, better don't even try. When you arrive, you'll need to pass through this door way to enter. Kind of like a tunnel.
This time, we used the 'short cut' from Parcel 1. This road is no longer accessible, we shall drive to the small creek and proceed by foot.

This innocent looking small creek does carry plenty of water when it rain. It run across the access road and crated a deep ravine across the road.

This actually cuts us off, otherwise we would have a nearer access. Shall ponder on this on a later date.

On the lower terrace, this are mostly planted on a latter date. I found only one plant infected by coccidae, black scale. This time we know what to do. Just clean off all the scale.
There are many types of vein type of weeds here. Some are parasitic / invasive.

I have to pry it out as it had embedded itself through the bark of the rubber tree, drawing nutrient from it. I guess it is slowly try to take over the rubber tree. Looks scary to me. Other vein types of weeds include the normal easily disposed type. There was one with sharp thorns.

 On the higher terrace, these were those that were planted in phase one, almost immediate after Parcel 1. Most trees have vigor growth (other than those affected by coccidae).

My surprise came when I notice the trunk size. It is bigger comparatively. All along have the impression that Parcel 1 was doing well and had been using it as the 'yardstick'. Also planning that Parcel 3 should be 'chasing' up to Parcel 1. Now our 'yardstick' shall be Parcel 2.
Had did some result and the average girth size are Year 1 = 5 cm, Year 2 = 10 cm, taken at 1m from ground.
Harvesting can be done when 80 % of the trees have a girth size of 45 cm, 1.5 m from ground or 1.25 m from union (graft joint) (base on yr 2008 study). Got to start collecting some measurement on the next visit.

 My walkabout, found 3 trees with Hevea Bark Necrosis, Trunk Phloem Necrosis (TPN). It's a stress like disease that kills the rubber tree.  One was totally death, but two survived.

I noticed some fungus like growth, common on the 2 survivor. Tried cleaning off the fungus by rubbing them off. Hopefully they shall do better.
After doing our maintenance at Parcel 2, that is fertilizing, pruning and weed control, we immediately sat down to have a meeting to shortlist what we had done to Parcel 2 that is different / same from Parcel 1 and 3. Parcel 2 & 3 has better growth than Parcel 1. The common factors are no banana trees on Parcel 2, Parcel 3 just planted. Used EM with chicken dung & rice husk. Have to verify the banana trees and check on growth rates in Parcel 1 that has no banana trees. Contemplating to re-initiate EM. If we can maintain this growth rate and duplicate it to the other parcel, we can start harvesting sooner.
There are also plenty of idle land in Parcel 2. Due to the accessibility, this shall be taking a back seat. During this trip, I noticed that there are lots of honey bees, maybe a good source of income, if we know how to domesticates them. Our trial sweet potatoes patch was dug up most probably by wild boar.
Looking forward to our next visit.

Parcel 6 Maitenance Visit.

A quick check on Parcel 6. We started off early in the morning to do some rubber tapping on the 45 odds old rubber trees. The yield was very little due to our once in a while tapping and small controlled tapping area. This exercise is to gear us toward future harvesting, more like a learning process. We managed twice the harvest of our last tapping due to that it rained yesterday and the trunk had dried. We tapped early, due to the cooler weather the latex keep draining and drys up longer. We also tapped a larger area than what was tapped previously as the trees were very matured and we only do irregular tapping. These are the contributing factors.

The picture above shows the UN-managed plantation, whereby the owner rent out the land. The contractor rent it and does uncontrolled harvesting to maximize his return. We had met the third group of people since working here for about 3 months. The picture to the left is our tapping on the 45 odds mature trees. That also we had most with "over tapped" panel done by the previous tapper. Now we had taken over to do controlled harvesting and training session on the tree.
Added sixty more banana trees to Parcel 6. Hope for a good banana harvest in the next nine months. Banana is the only proven crops that we have at the moment. We intend to move up market by replacing the Banana trees to higher value type, when we have the sucklings.

Out of those pumpkins planted by our previous partner, I guess less than one percent grew (omg).  Am trying to find out why. Seeds quality /  preparation? Wrong planting method? Wrong planting date (weather)? Land not suitable for pumpkin? Seed lost due to predator (Chicken from neighbor / birds / ants)? We are doing another  trial. Should know more on our next visit. The Serai planted on the previous visit shows sign of growth. Expanded a few more Serai. Did some trial with ground nuts too. All these are part of our plan to have some cash crops from our plantation, while waiting for the rubber trees to mature.
We have some fern-like weeds in Parcel 6 and it growing too fast, so much that it's blocking the sunlight from the rubber trees. We manage to clear half of these fern, surrounding the rubber trees. Shall have to include this into our maintenance for Parcel 6. Next visit shall do the other side (different access road) soon.