Expat World Gardening Club: My Gardening Journal..Things I have learned..

Aida's little slice of Heaven

This is the Gardening post that I promised today. I spent a fair amount of time working in the garden today and inspected all of the plants and made some comparisons..
A little back ground..Our beds are a little over 1 year old and this is our forth growing cycle..

The soil that was delivered to fill the beds was heavy in clay and the nutrient value seemed very low. The first growing cycle was not good. My tomatoes died one by one; they were Big Boys from the states..Red radishes grew but not the roots. They did not produce much at all..I planted cucumbers from the states without much success..Just a few deformed pieces and also some green peppers from the states which were not good..

The short story on my first planting was a very discouraging one and I was desperately trying to figure out why , even though I had always had a nice garden in the states, nothing would grow for me.
After this disaster was over we burned all the old plants and purchased potting soil from a couple of the garden centers in Tagum. Some of the so called potting soils looked very bad..Some of the bags had pasty black globs of something in it but it was all I had so I began to mix it into the beds along with a few boxes of sea gull poop and some 10-10-10 that I broadcast and worked into the soil. I also mixed in a few bags of sand..I was trying to create a sandy loam of sorts..

This next planting I planted a local squash ( kalabasa)...We got a good crop..We got 10 nice ones from 4 plants...and we planted rope beans..They did good as well...I bought tomato seeds from the states for growing in high temperatures..they grew well until the were ready to blossom and one by one they wilted and died.. We planted Oregano which did pretty well..cucumbers, from the states were still were not producing and bell peppers continued to not produce much..the fruit was small and deformed..

Frustrations Frustrations...
Fast forwarding to present I will outline what we did with the garden beds with some good advise from the Director of the Vermi-technology project at E-Park in Tagum City.,

1- We got several bags of cow manure..I spread this over the bed and let it dry for 2 weeks. then spend a couple more weeks working it into the soil until the texture was nice and fine...I found that the manure actually changed the structure of the soil and it appeared much more healthy even to the eye..

Bags of Worm Cast ready to use

2- I got a few bags of Worm cast compost...I also spread this out and worked it into the soil..

3. We grew all of our plants from seed..Our tomatoes are Diamante Max F1..Egg plant are indigenous to this area..We have 5 varieties of peppers. We are cultivating the wild chili...we grew sword pepper, heart pepper (chili), Habanero pepper..and a variety of sweet peppers that are grown here with a tender skin that are eatable..We have ginger and turmeric that are about 7 months old now..( we will wait until 1 year to harvest it)..

4- We germinated all the seeds directly in the worm compost..
We had more plants than we could use and gave quite a few away to friends...Worm compost is great for germination of seeds but when you use it to actually plant you should mix it with your soil because it is alkaline ...

Worm Compost

5- Planting...We planted about a month after spreading the manure etc and letting the beds rest for a time..When we planted the tomatoes and peppers we dug a 10 to 12 inch deep hole. We put cow manure in the bottom with water and a bit of soil..Then we added the worm compost and soil mix and lastly mixed in a scoopful of banana compost.The banana compost feeds the roots and fosters blossoming of your plant..Don't use uncomposted or raw banana skin in your garden...Anything rotting with generate heat and hurt your plants..Even manure needs to be dried and allowed to rot into the soil a bit..Don't use fresh because it will also burn your plants..

We water moderately each day, usually once a day..Sometime giving a small drink if the days were excessively hot, during the day if I see that the plants are distressed..

tomatoes and bamboo , double tired tomato cage

The results has been Great! ..All the plants are doing beautifully..The tomatoes have tons of blossoms and we have many small tomatoes that are visible..I designed a double tiered tomato cage and built it with split bamboo and tieback... it provides for support for 6 tomato plants at once..Things like this are great if you have limited space like I do..Hope you enjoy the pictures..Please feel free to comment in our Gardeners Forum..Carl