Papaya Tree

It would be nice if we could grow some papaya fruits in the new garden. I have one papaya tree in the backyard that grew in one of the holes of a concrete hollow block that we used to enclose the perimeter of a flowering shrub. I know I did not plant it there so it must have been dropped by a bird. That got me to thinking that perhaps I could extricate it from this small hole and transfer the papaya fruit in the new garden. It will have enough room there because the place is in full sun whereas the small garden that we have here at the back is partly in shade. I just don't have the space to grow papaya trees in the backyard so if I should grow some fruit trees, it will have to be in the new garden. I don't know anything about planting papaya fruit so I went online and read as much as I could. It's interesting to learn that they only have a productive lifespan of 3 1/2 years. What bothers me is that you could not tell the difference between a male, female, hermaphroditic or bisexual just by looking at the seeds during sowing time. So until the plants has grown and bore some flowers, that is about the only time that you could tell the difference. Anyway, reading about papaya plant has got me interested in buying a fruit in the supermarket tomorrow and save the seeds for planting. It would be nice if I could get some female or hermaphroditic seeds out of one papaya fruit. I am going to save the seeds of the vegetables that I cut from now on and  try to dry them out and use them for sowing.



Temporary Gate

We took a piece of old corrugated GI sheet from the house and used this as a temporary gate in the new garden. Around 12 noontime, we went home to eat lunch and rested for a short while. When we went back to the garden at about 1 PM, the temporary gate was gone! The temporary gate was missing. Right at the front of the entrance to the new garden is a neighbor's small sari-sari store. When we asked the owners of the store if they had seen anyone who might have taken the old GI sheet, they said that they didn't notice anyone because they closed the store around lunch time. How low can some people go to steal an old corrugate GI sheet? To think that we just put it there this morning and a few hours later it goes missing. If some people can steal an old GI sheet, how much more for the plants?  I am wondering if it is just laziness on someones part that caused the person to steal the temporary gate.  With this incidence, it is all the more important that we put a gate in this new garden and lock it up when we leave for the day to protect the plants from thieves. I would not want anyone to go stealing the fruits of our labor when we are not around to watch the garden. So now, it is not just the dogs and chickens that we have to watch out for, that includes bad people as well. Perhaps one of the neighbors surrounding this garden is pissed off because now that we cleaned out the place, they no longer have a place to dump their garbage. Anyway, we'll just have to do the best we can to get along with all of the neighbors so there will be no quarrels between us. God will take care of the rest for us.

Transplanting Coffee Plants

Still raining here today. We do have some transplanting to do if the weather will cooperate tomorrow. There are some coffee plants in our backyard that are ready to be transplanted in the new garden. They are about 18 inches tall already. These will serve as a buffer against the strong winds that comes from the south side of the new garden. Half of the retaining wall on the south side collapsed while the other half is still intact. We will put these coffee plants 3 feet away from the top of the retaining wall that did not collapse. By putting the coffee plants at a distance of 3 feet away from the edge of the stone retaining wall, this will give us some space to work if there should be any repairs to be done without falling off the high wall. 

On the other half of this south wall that collapsed, my plan is to split this into two levels instead of putting it back to its original height which is at the same level as the other half that did not collapse. My plan is to use some bamboo plants at the lower level because these will grow tall and the root system of the bamboo will help to control soil erosion. Once the bamboo plants grow tall, it will also help to buffer the wind coming from this south side so it will help to protect the plants. On the second level, I think I will just put an interlink fence so we do not fall down to the first level and this fence can also serve as a trellis for some vegetables at the same time. Well, these are my plans anyway until I can come up with something better to improve the condition of the south wall.

Net Fence, vs. Wire Mesh Fence

It rained hard the whole day today so I stayed indoors, there wasn't much that I could do outside. I spent the day reading some agricultural magazines and I slept for most of the afternoon until it was time to make supper. I hope the weather will be better tomorrow so we could continue the work in the new garden. I'm thinking of fencing the new garden to ward off the neighbor's free-range chickens and dogs that likes to play there.  The fence that I had in mind is more of a net fencing material actually just like the ones that are used for shade to filter the sun's rays so it doesn't burn the plants. They come in 6 feet high and in two colors, black and green. I could buy them by the meter but I'll have to measure the area that I want to fence off first. I've used this net materials before over my Anthurium flowers some years ago. I had to double the net when I used them to protect the flowers from direct sunlight. I may need some steel posts to hold the nets up in place as these are 6 feet tall, maybe even a bamboo pole will do if I can get some from my friend Mary. My other option is to remove the old wire mesh fence in the backyard garden and transfer this to the new hill garden. The chickens in the backyard are all fenced off in their chicken coop and run anyway so they could not really come into the backyard garden except for the escape artist in the group who still manages to find its way out somehow every once in a while.   Oh well, I suppose I can always put the escape artist in the stew pot when the time comes because we have two roos already and only one is needed to fertilize the eggs of 10 hens. Besides, two roos is a crowd.

Rabbit Manure as Fertilizer

Some people use aged chicken manure as fertilizer for the plants but we don't have many of that available. What little chicken manure that we have out of the 6 chickens in the coop are all being used in the big hill garden to fetilize the coffee plants. We do have rabbit manure and since this is considered as a cold manure, so we are going to use this instead of chicken manure. We applied rabbit manure in some of the raised beds but we do not have enough manure yet to use on all the raised rows. What we did was to dig a hole on the raised beds following the plant spacing where the plants are to be planted and dumped a shovel of rabbit manure in it. We then mixed the rabbit manure with the soil and covered the hole up with 3 inches of soil. We will let these raised beds to rest for a month while waiting for the rainy season to subside a little and then we will start planting.  We are also going to make use of rabbit manure as tea fertilizer to water the plants. It should be interesting to see what will happen with the plant's growth once we use rabbit manure as fertilizer.

Raised Beds vs. Raised Row

I have been doing a lot of reading on the Internet about the benefits of using raised beds over a raised row when it comes to making plots in the garden. Raised bed is really good especially with people like me with a back problem and because of ageing ha-ha-ha. As much as I would like to have a raised bed in the new hill garden because of its advantages, it's just not possible at this time. You see, we are currently building the 4th unit in our rental apartment and that is our priority project for now. In the meantime, I will have to contend myself with using raised rows instead of raised beds for now. The raised rows that we made on the higher portion of the garden is not going up and down the hill but rather, it goes across the hill. This should help to prevent soil erosion and the rain water will soak into the soil instead of it running off downhill. In some areas with a gentle slope, we had to make a short terrace just to contain the soil. We made some provisions for the excess rain water that comes from the north which is on higher ground, to drain on the left side where there is a canal instead of it going downhill to the south where it previously eroded the retaining wall. I just hope that we will not be visited by another strong typhoon again so as not to aggravate the problem. It is still the rainy season here and the Weather Bureau people are saying that it could be rainy until the early part of next year. I hope that this will not happen because I am looking forward to doing some vegetable gardening pretty soon.  

Cleaning Out the New Garden

This new hill garden is enclosed on three sides with stone retaining walls and their height varies depending on the contour of the land. There is no retaining wall on the north side which is two feet higher than the next door neighbor's property. There was a lot of hullabaloo about the boundary between us and this neighbor living on the north side of the property and so the lot was put on status qouo for several years. When the matter was finally settled and the boundaries were made, my late younger brother Paul and some hired relatives worked hard on levelling this hill in preparation for a garden but it came to a point where my brother got sick and had to be hospitalized until he passed away.  Because of the painful memories that has happened over this particular lot, we tried to avoid visiting the place until just recently.  Someone told us that the neighbor on the north side of this lot is trying to encroach on the property once again. This was a wake up call for my family which is why I decided to finish the work and make this lot into a new vegetable garden.   

In all of those 13 years that we did not cultivate the land, the neighbors on three sides of the property has made this lot their dumping site for their garbage. Without asking any permission from us, they dug up some holes and burned their trash on the lot. Where they burned their trash, the soil is blackish which is okay as it made fertilizer for the soil but they also threw some broken bottles or glasses with their trash!  Every time that we dig up a shovelful of dirt in the area where they burned their trash, more broken glasses would come up! We had to hand-pick these broken pieces of glass very carefully least we cut our hands in the process of cleaning it out. It was very time consuming but it had to be done. We also had to dig up all the tall weeds and deep-rooted grasses that had grown all over the garden. It took us four and a half days just cleaning up the whole area. Now we could finally say that the lot is free from trash and weeds and most especially broken bottles and glasses.