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.

Parcel 3 Visit on 2nd Week October

The road to Parcel 1, 2 & 3 is becoming bad to worst, due to the construction of the new road. It's getting so bumpy that it'll pop your brains out of your head. Hope that they shall expedite the construction. The good thing is that all the slippery patch had been cleared, so we can access even on rainy days.

This is my first visit to Parcel 3 as the current project co-originator. We had started to to plan Banana trees at Parcel 3 as if more delayed, shall means delayed harvest. We had manged to plant more than 200 banana trees, mostly of the Fried Banana, Pisang Raja and some Pisang Emas. I guess we can squeezes in maybe 200 more.
I find the there are lots to be done over at Parcel 3. Manage to identified lots of vacant area that we can still plant rubber trees. Guess we shall implement it stage by stage. Called up Lembaga Getah and was told that they had stopped selling plant-lets and may only reopen sometime next year. Guess we shall have to try sourcing from elsewhere.

 I guess we had missed a couple of pruning session as I found that some of the side branches are getting thick. We need to do early pruning so that the trunk shall grow smooth and tall. This shall provide more tapping area during harvesting. We did a pruning run for the whole of Parcel 3. A fertilizing run was also done. This time we are trying out a commercial fertilizer specially for immature rubber tress. It is suppose to provide vigor growth as well as to strengthen the roots. The first 3 years of immature care, shall set the foundation of the rubber trees. Shall check for feedback latter part of the month. If the results shows good potential, we shall extend this fertilizer to the rest of the Parcels.
We have about five terrace on the lower left of Parcel 3 overran with weeds so much so that we ave difficulty seeing the rubber trees. We had applied weeds killer and shall see the results on the next visit.
We had a productive week and had manage to meet our main and even some primary objectives for this visit. We had left out the right corner of Parcel 3 that connects to Parcel 2, due to a mechanical problem with our Hilux. Shall leave it to our next visit. The lower radiator rubber hose busted, and luckily one of the helpers noticed water leaking out. We had to wait till it cool, dismantled the rubber hose to find the leak. Guess it must be our lucky day. We managed to "shorten" the hose and made it back to town for repairs.
Stay tuned for our next update.

Big Changes At Our Little Farm

This month we had a big changes to our little farm. One of our pioneering founder had decide to call it a day and opted out. He has rendered us tremendous help in setting our farms, especially parcel 1, 2 and 3. We couldn't had start off without him.

I had currently stepped in to take up the challenge of running the set up.  After two years of retirement, getting back to work is rather tiring. On the bright side, I get to do more exercise and am slimming down to I guess maybe 75 kilos. Doing farm work, I should be able to build up my stamina and muscles.

Starting off with Parcel 5, our little 4 acres experimental farm. After lengthy discussion with our helpers, to find out their confidence on the type of crops, and also with the seeds that we still have in our store, we had decided to concentrate on Brinjals, Lady's fingers, Sweet Corn, Chillies and Pumpkins. These shall be our main crops at the moment, as we do not want to be too diversified. We are also salving the existing crops like Avocados, Banana, Nangka, Serai, Ginger, Yam and also some papayas that we had just planted. We are also experimenting with some Bitter gourd, seeds that we already have. I guess we shall save more time salvaging, rather than planting a new. We are also ending our green vegetable runs, by finishing off the maybe 15 beds that we current have due to too low a market price, too much work (labor intensive) and constantly harvesting & replanting. We are shifting from Plant & Plant (plant more, hope many grows and produce) from the previous management to Planting, Caring & Marketing. I guess we were moving forward too fast, planting previously and not spending much time on caring. This new strategy shall emphasis new Planting of crops with less labor intensive, Caring for all existing crops ( watering /insect /disease /fertilizer management) and Marketing so that we are in tune with the market.

 The first two weeks, we had manage to identified the disease and insects attack on our plants. We are glad that we now know at least how to handle it. Once it's under controlled, we shall proceed to experimenting with fertilizing. Being Agriculture, it takes a while to see the results (good or bad) from your testing. We had lots of external help from a good friend Micheal. Moving on to Fertilizing shall include Organic, inorganic and effective microbes. Organic shall be in the form of Chicken dung, with nutrients and trace elements for long term fertilizing. Commercial fertilizer NPK, for faster in soil  fertilization. We are also experimenting with foliar fertilizer. Re-initiating theEffective Microbes that were proven to be very effective. On the marketing, we are targeting the coming Raya, 2nd week of November with some of our produce. Hope to have a sell out.

With these fine tuning, we hope to hit our objective, which is short term, we hope to arrest the negative cash flow by end February 2012. Long term objective is to experiment with crops, learning to plant and take good care of the crops to produce commercial grade harvest, identify the suitable crops and duplicate it at the rubber plantation on a bigger scale. Elevate the standard of living for everyone that is involve in this project. This way we can manifest more life, by producing more food to feed the world.
Stay tune for more updates on the rest of the farms.

Parcel 6, AMonth Later.

It's been a month since we had started planting. We had almost finished planting the first lot. Did a checked and did a fertilization run. Our terrace method, planting style and technique had improved. Most of the plant-lets are looking healthy, except for approximately 60 plant-lets that had died off. Shall be needing about 120 to 150 more plant-lets to replace and plant some remaining area. By maximizing the plants per acre, we hope to get a higher yield. Banana had also been planted for a quarter of the lot.

We also took this opportunity to start trimming the branches as the plant were growing well. Only a couple of the pumpkin sprouted. We are also exploring what other crops we can plant on the edges of the terrace. Banana, papaya, sweet potatoes, groundnuts, pumpkin, chilli are some of the plants under consideration.

There are about 45 old rubber trees here. We shall be using it as a training and testing trees. We managed to do two test run and obtained about Five kilos of rubber clumps.

 Overall I think the results so far is very encouraging. Looking forward to our next maintenance sometime in December. In the mean time, am looking into planting more cash crops.

Parcel 6 executing.

Parcel 6 in the morning. Filled with fog at 7.00 a.m. It starts to clear by 9.30 a.m. I wonder if this is a daily event. It's so cooling with a small breeze blowing through the valley. We managed to saved some fruit and old rubber trees planted previously, about 50 of them. Planning to leave the old rubber trees for training of our tappers later on. In the mean time, one of our helper started to tap.

We had finally manage to terrace and cleared the said land. Now we have an immediate issue of land dispute, we have people now claiming to 'own' part of the land. These people are making big claim and demanding high compensation. We had forwarded this issue to the land department and as it's the Ramadan Month, they can only dispatch surveyor to check out the issue after the Hari Raya holidays. As the land comprise of 2 plots, we shall continue to work on the "safe" lot. We had started to plant banana trees. Bored holes for rubber trees and planting pumpkins. Other crops that we are planning to propagate are Sweet potatoes, Groundnuts, Papayas, Pineapples and Avocados. There is a small creek at the bottom of the valley, but the water run off is very small. After rain, there are pools of trap water. Am planning to build a Yam patch or plant any 'wet' plants.