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.

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.

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.

Updates on plants that we had planted back in March.

The ginger plant had been transplanted successful. We had planted two types, Chinese Ginger and Village ginger. Both looks good after transplanting, but we do have some young plants dying on us, which I guess most probably we could have damage the roots while doing the transplant. Checked on our ginger plant nursery, there are still some ginger plant sprouting, especially from the sawdust covered patch. I did some transplanting few days ago on some new sprouting. I find that the roots had grown into the soil and it makes trans planting difficult. I would propose for our next germination, we shall a 5~6 inches sawdust bedding first, then lay the ginger flat. I think it shall have a higher/faster yield. Had dinged up the deeper ginger, relocated to the top and it's sprouting now.
The groundnut patch is on the upper left of the 1st picture. It's growing well and pretty green. It has started to flowered. Groundnuts shall be produced when the flower withered and drop (bend) down to the ground. There are instance where you see healthy growing plants, but no nuts. Hope that ours shall have big and juicy groundnuts and ginger.

Yam, these are growing well and should be as there were (and still) lots of wild yam before. Yam is easy to plant and do not need much care. We had add another 60+ Yams on the other side of the stream.
Corns, the Thai Super sweet (white maize) is a failure. It's growing so slowly, skinny and not consistent. Some is fruiting, some is not growing, some dying and lots of no growth. Lots of weeds in the area, are doing some weeding but don't think it'll help much. Failure could be lots of possibility as we are planting village style. Guess we shall most probably finish off the left over seedlings and stick to chicken feed corn.

The Chicken feed corn (red color maze) is doing well and growing steadily and consistently. It's growing faster than the weeds and not much care is needed.

Pineapple, surprisingly some are bearing fruits. We had planted about 20 plants, just for testing and maybe create some plant-lets. Guess we shall not buy the pineapple hormone this time as it's the first planting and only a couple is fruiting, hence it's not economical to buy.
This area is a low laying area and has a pool of stagnant water. It drown even the hardy Chicken feed corn. We had dig a drain to drain off excess water. Shall weed off the weeds in a couple of days and have a better picture on what to be done here.
More updates on the progress of the farm in the coming days.

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.