Micro Propagating Banana, Pisang Berangan, Musa cv Berangan.

Micro propagating Banana Berangan, lazy man's version.

Was chatting with my helper to request him to transfer out those Berangan banana to replaced those unwanted cultivars, especially the Cavendish. I couldn't find market for the Cavendish as our buyers refuse to accept those. They call it Pisang Hijau, Green Banana. These Cavendish don't turn yellow  until way over ripe. Nobody want to buy, except a few who use it to make cakes. The last batch of 10 bunches which I send to our Free Range Chicken were left untouched cause I thin that the chicken may not know that it had ripe.

I was then told that there are a couple of Berangan that is bigger, both trees & fruits. We have 3 groups of it only and the sucklings are only a hand full. Other Berangan is smaller, trees & fruits but we have quite a number of these. I then remember we can do micro propagating. I read through there instruction and find it quite bothersome and plenty work especially the sterilizing part. I then came out with a short cut, lazy man's version.

Berangan.The tree next to the wheel barrow.

I requested my helper to identify the Berangan that he wanted. I then choose a medium plant of above 6 months ( I guess). 1 fine morning, after it rained the previous night (thank god), I started out to dig out the plant. It turned out to be quite a tough challenge even with wet soil. I can't imagine if the soil is dry and hard. It was hard work (for me). I had with me a machete, a crowbar, a cangkor and a wheelbarrow. It too me almost 2 hours to dig out the whole corm undamaged.

A heavy fellow. Berangan corm.

The corm was pretty heavy, unlike the big trunk which was light comparatively. I cut it down further hoping to reduce it's weight but it didn't help. Wheel it to our water tank to have the soil removed, clean and cut off the roots.

While cleaning, found another 3 suckers with corms. It's a small ones. I then core up the middle all the way to the corm. This is pretty easy as it is very soft. Once it reached the corm, it feels slightly harder. Had the corm divided into 8 section, without cutting through. For the smaller pieces, 4 sections.

 Dug up a hole and had it planted back to the same level.

The same were done for the smaller pieces. Covered back with soil and watered.

I then cover them up with some banana leafs. Let's leave them for 3 weeks.

Nursery At Our Little Farm

Had been working on our nursery since last year, after we planned on producing value added products for our farm. We started off initially producing banana suckling for our plantation. Our nursery had grown since then.

On the bananas, we now have variety which we like such as berangan, emas, kerling and saba. We also have other varieties which we shall discontinue as we feel that it's not suitable.

Our Chinese yam, sucklings are produce in-house. We are now at the 4th generation.

Papaya seedling are already in progress, we are now producing the Mas Solo varieties. Seeds were taken from the trees we planted back in April last year. First batch of about 150 plants had already been transferred into poly bags. Papaya seeds maybe the easiest to germinate.

The first batch of Agarwood, didn't went as smooth as anticipated. Due to the recent heavy rain, it's infected with Phytophthora fungal. Had already had some mortality. Punched holes on the poly bag to increase drainage. Organized and counted to be about 590 plants. Also I may had send it for hardening too early. Had put up a shade netting of D 70.

Soursop plant-lets are at the hardening stage, estimated to be about 150. May not be grafting soursop as it bear fruits quite early, about 3 years. This takes the longest time to germinate.

Jackfruits, we have plenty. I guess I was not successful on the grafting on the previous batch is that the rootstock could be too small. It should be at 'pencil' size. Had added another qualifier, that it should have mature leaves (3 lobed). Ao far had only managed 2 plant-lets, that was transferred to field planting. Another 5 in the waiting. Looks like I need to put in more effort here.

We now have 3 types of lime. The numbers of plant-lets is only at 14.

Rubber seedlings, estimate to be in the region of 350. I tried germinating 200 seeds. Had also pulled about 250 seedlings that germinated from the rubber plantation next door. Looks like we may not need to germinate, as it's lesser work, just to collect from the rubber plantation. Grafting, had not had any success yet.

Avocado, we are already on the 3rd batch. Had transferred about 40 successfully grafted plants to the field.

Other seedling that we are preparing are breadfruit, chempedak and manggo. There are still plenty more to learn. The numbers of successfully grafted plants are still low. Am working hard on it.  These shall keep me busy for a while. Planning to finish off my chaos and be home for the Chinese New Year celebration. Stay tune 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.

Progress on Parcel 5

Sweet Potatoes, these were transplanted a week back via 'cutting' method. We cut lengths of about 7 to 8" and with roots. Plant it on the ground and watered it for the next few days. Some did not made it, but 60% did. This is growing now. Have to weed our the surrounding on the next visit. Once it starts to grow, it's easier to propagate further. We are still looking for the Japanese Potatoes variety.

Couples of frogs made home at our nursery. As it did not affect the germination, we left it be. Tadpoles are growing too. Hope it shall help us eliminate the mosquitoes and other insects. Come to think of it, Frog Farming?

Avocado are fruiting, we have 4 trees here. Shall check again when it's ready to plucking.

A small avocado tree ready for transplanting.

Our lemon grass is growing. These were planted back in March.

We have rows of Lemon grass along our perimeter. Banana too.

Our worker experimenting with Long Beans and French beans.

Our corn for chicken feed.

Our Yams is also progressing well.

A visit to Parcel 1

Parcel 1, my favorite Parcel. This is the Parcel where it all started. Our road /plan for farming. When I was a kid, I dream of having a farm full of banana trees. Parcel 1, the easier accessed (out of the first 3. Our base station here.
A very peculiar tree, growing only vertically with no side brunch at all. Parcel 1 is doing rather well except foe the stolen trees. As Parcel 1 was the first that was planted, the trees in this Parcel are the biggest. Soil at Parcel 1 is also beginning to turn brown, which is good for planting. This shall open other opportunities for us as integrated farming.

Another tall tree, but this was trimmed. Trimming / pruning the lower brunch so that the tree shall grow taller faster, lesser brunch, ease tapping in the future. Time for the next round of fertilizer in June. This time, we shall have to increase the quantity of fertilizing. Hope these tree shall be growing fast.

Other development in Parcel 1 is that the Banana trees that we planted had begin to bear fruits. Once it is harvested, we can start re-planting it's sucklings. Planting more cash crops, it maybe able to supplement our expenses. Shall be planning to plant more Banana trees in Parcel 1, then expand to Parcel 3. We have 4 varieties of Banana, Berangan, Pisang Emas, Cavandish and those that they use to make goreng pisang. Let's hope that we shall have plenty of Banana harvest by next year. We'll need to have more harvest per time as to cover our transportation as our farm is in "off" location.

Our helpers had started to experiment planting of white chillies and it seems to be thriving well. Shall most probably expand on these. This is also a cash crop that can be harvested in a couple of months. Last check the ex-farm price is $ 15 per kilo. Shall be leaving some to ripe to be use as seeds.

Our helpers are also experimenting with groundnuts and seems to be thriving too. Proper planting distance shall be 3 X 4 feet. This shall leave some space for the groundnuts to flower, ripe and drop to the ground. Without space to drop to the ground, no groundnut shall be produce. Let's see how much groundnuts it shall produce. Shall plan after we review the harvest.

Sweet potatoes, a hardy vine type of plant. Can be used as ground covering (preventing weeds ), young leaves as vegetable and the roots for food. We are still looking for the Japanese strain, (purple color skin and purple color roots. Ours now is a mixture of purple color skin, yellow roots and yellow skin, yellow roots.

Our helpers are trying long beans too. We are leaving the beans for seeds.

This is what had became of our failed ginger patch. Shall have to clean up the weeds and find the ginger. I guess just a couple survived.

Our chicken coop. Plant to start a large colony of free range chicken here. Last picture shows some young chillies trees in between the rubber trees.

Back to Farming

First day, back to farming, after a long break. It's so tiring, even simple chore of lifting the Cangkul seems like lifting a ton. It was raining for the whole morning, good for us as we are doing new planting. This shall keep the new plant from being dehydrated. We are now working on Parcel 5. Parcel 5 is a 4 acres plot of relatively flat land with a small creek running through the middle, cutting off the land into two almost equal half. This piece of land was planted on before hence no need for heavy clearing. Still we are having trouble clearing it of some heavy grass, tapioca, wild yams, wild bananas & etc.

A panoramic sweep of Parcel 5. We can only see half of the parcel from this point, as the other is seperated by the creek. Anyway, we shall concentrate here first. We are planning to plant Banana, Yam, Corn and some vegetables here. We had started a Ginger patch beneath a tree.

Only a couple start growing. The first batch of corns are growing nicely. This is the Kampung variety, grow for chicken feed. We are testing out some Thailand Hybrid Sweet Corn too.

We had also planted some tissue culture Cavendish banana.

Saw some massive sized earthworms while clearing the land of tapioca. It's about 12 mm in diameter, maybe I'll catch a few of these and breed them in a worm bin. Have to start planning on how to built a worm bin.
Need to have an early night as I'm exhausted.