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.