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.