El Nino and La Nina Prods Us To Zero Tillage

Friends

It has been almost two months since we were able to get into our blog page. The reasons were technical and the travels that we had to undertake.

It has been raining since the middle of June and it just wiped out months of drought.

In the beginning of July we planted cabbages and succhinni. Because of the rainy season, we planted the succhini seeds in compost plastic bags and transplanted them in the field two weeks after sowing. This method allowed us not to till the soil again, which, otherwise would have been a difficult job--what with the rain and all. The planting beds were covered with black plastic mulching thus eliminating weed growth.

The potatoes were directly planted after the garden beds were fertilized with chicken manure because we ran out of compost.

After three weeks of growth, all three crops were attacked. First the potatoes was attacked by blight. We had no recourse but to spray with fungicides otherwise all the crops will be lost. Becuse it rained every day, we sprayed twice a week using a sticker called tenac so that the fungicide will stick to the plant leaves.

The cabbages were likewise afflicted with headrot but were able to prevent further damage by spraying fungicides. The succhinni fruits were also attacked but we did not spray. Some of the fruits were able to withstand the rotting and on the middle of August we were able to harvest.

What are left now are potatoes and cabbages but take not they are no longer organically grown and pesticide free. We planted a few red cabbages and onion leeks and they grew wonderfully, surviving any fungal attack. These were harvested recently and brought to the cooperative of the Benguet State University which patronizes our products.

Meanwhile, we have planted the rest of the gardens with sweet potato which grows robustly during the rainy season as well as taro or gabi. Both crops favor the rainy season. We also planted chayote, vine vegetable fruit and it is giving us so much harvest although the prices are not too high but good enough to meet our expense needs.

I have been travelling in several provinces talking to farmers on food security. It was a nice experience, a learning one. There was and impending drought on June only to be negated by sudden rush of heavy rains since the end of June. It is still raining cats and dogs daily but life has to go on...we need to go on planting. We are thankful, what more can we expect..
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After the work, comes the reward

My, it is now more than a month since my last blog. My memory did not serve me well the last time I tried to get into this net world thus, my password got lost in the cyberspace. But here we are again.

The rains have become incessantly inconvenient. It is good for one thing--for irrigation and bad for two or three things--it enhances fungal growth, washes away top soil and prevents us from doing much work.

There were 16 harvests on the succhini, done at intervals of three days each. There are still some plants left while we rid the rest by roguing--fruits started rotting because of the rain. Since we don't use fungicides, we have to let go but about 90 per cent of the fruits have been harvested. Ther brocolli will be harvested next week as well as the cabbages. The onion leeks were harvested in one day. The Romaine lettuce were harvested in 20 pickings.

All in all, a total of 880 kg of succhini were harvested while 120 kg was realized from the onion leeks. Two hundred and ten kilos were marketed out from the Romaine lettuce.

The harvests were good--some 70 per cent delivered to cooperatives and to the Benguet State University Marketing Center which provides vegetables for faculty and students of the university. The rest of 30 per cent were orders from families in the community. We prefer selling to university marketing center because they maintain strict adherence to pesticide-free products.

Well, we had our first harvests and it feels good. The working students brought home some for their use and many are thinking of starting their own gardens once they finish their training. All are enthusiastic. We are looking forward to our harvests on potato and cabbage.

Meanwhile , our seedlings are growing well and some will be planted next week. Some have been bought and our hands our really full this rainy season.

It's gonna be a wet season but better wet than upset, if we did a poor job. But we did pretty well for this first threee months, with a little prayer thrown in and a bit of Irish luck.

First Harvest

Today, we harvested the first of our five major crops. The Romaine lettuce was harvested, partially, yielding some 45 kg. It was harvested by three representatives of four families who made the orders. The second crop harvested was succhinni which produced 65 kg on the first harvest. It was ordered by a local cooperative. The cooperative and our organization is holding a small trade fair on organic vegetables and ethnic or locally planted fruits, vegetables, medicinal plants and locally cooked foods.

Both crops will be harvested every two days . We are making a record of each harvest to eventually come out with a total. The second harvest will be on Wednesday.

Letuce attacked, hot chili to the rescue

Our Romaine lettuce are being attacked. The degree of destruction is minimal and non-significant but we have to control it before it gets worse. The culprit is the black cutworm that lives in the soil. At night time, the worm comes out and eats the lettuce leaves, thus defoliating them and goes back to the soil. So we have to wake up early and pick off these worms at sunrise before they go back to the soil. If they do, we dig them out from the base of the lettuce plants.

To rid the lettuce of the worms, we will spray hot chili and tobacco solution tomorrow. The worms are repelled by the combined solution.

Fertilizer Topdressing Methods Used

All our crops were fertilized with chicken manure and compost as basal fertilizer. Our normal procedure is that during flowering stage or 25 to 30 days after transplanting, we topdress fertilizer to supplement the basal fertilizer. This is important because the plants would be needing more nutrients as they shift to their botanical transformation as in flowering to fruiting (eg. succhinni).

We do not use inorganic fertilizers, we make use of processed chicken manure (PCM) and crumbled organic fertilizer (COF). Both are applied in three ways. First, they can be applied in between rows of the plants then covered with soil from the canals of the plots. This is is beneficial but labor intensive because you have to scrape off the top soil from the canal with a hoe and put back the soil on the plot to cover the topdressed fertilizer. Beneficial in the sense that the topsoil washed off to the plots' canals are brought back to the plants and used together with the topdressing.

The saecond method followed is by drilling PCM or COF through small holes near the plants root areas and covering it with soil. This method allows the plant to immediately use the fertilizer.

The third method is through fertigation. PCM and COF are mixed thouroughly with the water to be used in irrigation, in our case, from a deeply excavated water hole. Watering cans are used to fetch the water and applied through overhead irrigation.

All three are effective methods.

Rains and Rats

It rained so hard yesterday and today that rats from the nearby mountains scampered over the fields. Using a slicker and rubber boots, I went to check on the soil traps and check dams of the vegetable plots. It rained the whole night too.

This morning, damage was observed on the succhini flowers and some fruits. It was done by the rats for sure. I applied poison baits this afternoon to ward off and kill the rats. With some prayers too.

We will not be watering for a week because of the strong rain. The succhini will be ready for harvest in two weeks time. The broccolli, cabbage and potatoes are doing well.

The seeds we sowed in our nursery have sprung up. Some 4,000 assorted nitrogen fixing (Caliandra calothyrsus, Flemingia macrophylla) and biofuel trees (Jatropha curcas, Pangomia pinnata, Pitospforum resinefirum) have been planted. We also sowed passion fruit and Spanish tomato fruits. Our hives are busy with bee activities. The bees can be seen all over the succhini plants pollinating and seeking nectar as they are attracted by the vegetables' yellow flowers.

Botanical Insecticide

Today, I will describe how I prepared botanical pesticide for crawling worms and larvae that attack our crops especially cabbage and brocolli. The most destructive of these worms are cabbage butterflies, diamondback moths, leafminers and inchworms.

The botanical insecticide was prepared using half drum of water, wild sunflower (Tithanium diversifoleum) shoots, kakawate (Madre de cacao) leaves and cigarette butts. One sack of sunflower shoots and kakawate leaves were gathered. The sack was tied up so the leaves would not come out of the sack. Then the sack was immersed in the drum filled with one half drum of water. Also immersed in the water were some 100 cigarette butts gathered from smokers who included our farmer partners. A heavy stone was placed on top of the sack to prevent it from floating, after which, the drum was covered.

The plants were left to rot for two weeks. The drum was opened and the water with the decomposed decoction was allowed to pass through a screen and sieve to remove the substrates and decomposed leaf tissues. A fine mesh cloth was used to finally filter the water. One liter of this solution was mixed with 15 liters of water . This was used to spray against the worms and larva attacking the cabbages and brocolli.

The effect shows that after a few minutes, the larvae and caterpillar drop off the plants and die. The sunflower and kakawate leaves have properties that kill off the worms. The effect of both leaves is made more potent by the tar and nicotine extracts from the cigarette butts.

This is our effective, simple and inexpensive control for worms and larvae. Our warning though, the only disadavantage is that the decoction smells and the applicator should cover all his body and face to prevent the smell from sticking to his skin. But the extract is safe when in contact with the skin.
Next Time: TopDressing Fertilizer