Monday, October 8, 2007

Fast Forward

First I would like to apologize for not posting updates about our farm. We’ve been so busy preparing for agri-link. Here’s what happened in the farm for the past several weeks. First, the mung beans grew to almost a meter high. We then incorporated them in the soil. While waiting for the mung beans to decompose, we started sowing lettuce seeds and other vegetable seeds in our greenhouse. With regular watering of compost tea (more about compost teas later) the leaves of the green manure decomposed faster than expected. We then planted our first set of vegetables on their respective plots. By-the-way, we also built trellises for our creepy crawling veggies. A little background about our trellises; it’s made of good lumber coated with wax. Why wax? Because we can’t use chemical wood preservatives since we practice organic farming. We even used beeswax on six of our eight sets of trellises. Here’s a short list of vegetables and fruits we’ve planted so far: twelve kinds lettuce, bitter gourd (ampalaya), cucumber, upland or Chinese kangkong, water gourd (upo), papaya, okra, coriander, Chinese parsley (kinchai), Chinese kale, arugula, spinach, eggplant, tomato, three kinds of pepper, beet, turnip, radish, carrots, two kinds of onion, soy beans, pole beans (sitao), snap beans, corn, French marigolds and stevia. WOW! I never realized we had this much variety in our farm until now. And we still have so many seeds waiting to be sowed.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi. what steps did you take to 'incorporate' the mung to the plots? before flowering did you pull them out and leave the mung there? thanks!

Raymond and Mariel......................................... said...

hello. thank you for visiting our blog site. you can use a pair of grass scissors to cut the mung beans at ground level or you can use a sharpened spade to push them against the soil. do not pull them out of the soil.

i will post pictures next week on how to incorporate the decomposed leaves of mung beans using double digging practice.