Mushrooms

My friend saw mushroom photos on my laptop and told me that the white, fan-like ones that grow on our logs are edible. Called kurakdot in Bicol, it is cooked in coconut milk (as is everything there).

I was able to gather a fair amount when I got home, as there was a light rainy spell. I got a couple of tenga ng daga (rats' ears), which I discovered, are called monkeys' ears in Negros. Here is how they look on the logs:



So they were altogether sauteed with onions and mixed with olive oil and rice... Mmm.

Pasko Na Naman Muli

(The title means "It's Christmas again", it's a cool Filipino Christmas jovial song.)



I spotted a brown shrike (tarat), seeking refuge in the Philippines from the cold Chinese winters, outside my window this morning (photo was taken through a screen, that's why it's crappy). The migratory tarat, different from our local black ones, usually arrives around September, but I haven't seen one this year until today.

A few days ago in Cambodia, while zooming around the city on a moped, I would often remark loudly, above the wind, "Putangina!! Ang lamig!!!!" and go on about how it never gets that cold in the Philippines. Well, I came back to the garden and realized, that it indeed almost measures up.

The nights are a bit too cold for my tropical constitution, and I can't take a shower without heating water (which I do in a kettle, with added herbs for fragrance and pleasure). The soil is a bit dry, with humidity pretty low overall. There is still morning dew, but I don't think there is as much decomposing happening. The mushrooms on my logs are going away. And, oddly enough, there are mosquitoes everywhere.

Frankly, I haven't understood this weather completely just yet. I was looking forward to putting a bunch of plants in, but it seems to be pretty difficult to do that now, my gut tells me.

I need some more time to figure this whole mood out, and I'll post about it. In the meantime, behold our family Christmas bamboo!

Cambodia Sightings

Very interesting plant life in Cambodia, especially because I can easily take some home and they will probably survive. Many common species between us.

Here are pomegranates (seen one near my house, but never gotten around to snatching it up).



Rose moss:



Water flower:



And a beautiful flower on a vine by the royal palace.

Free Bananas!

Walking around and spotting bananas that belong to no one in particular.

Log Appreciation Post: Whale Carcass of The Garden

Logs are a good way to start some life in a flat area. When I think about how life forms around edges (i.e. people inhabit waterways or shady areas, fish seek refuge along root systems, we pee against trees), logs are actually a very reasonable choice for easy injection of life in an otherwise ho-hum area.

You know how they say whales decomposing on the ocean floor provide a home to a myriad of organisms? I think logs are like that. They are easy and decompose without help, albeit slower if there's more sunlight. I see logs as willing outlayers on the fringe, like avant garde artists who can slowly change norms around themselves in a flat area just by plopping themselves down there.

Maybe a month ago, I decided to develop a new area for baby plants. The area I nurse seedlings at, beside my room, has far too many mosquitoes for comfort, and I got sort of tired going out there looking like a beekeeper all the time. Furthermore, the soil there was clayish and hard. So I began to build (first by accident) a colony of logs in a separate area out front.

I don't cut the trees down myself. I take them from villages where people seem to have this habit of not wanting "things in the way" and cutting trees on whims. I began leaving the logs just by the walkway, because after a night out, moving them to a "proper tidy place" can be taxing.

So a pile of logs developed, and the grass around them began growing quite vigorously, and interesting fungus began appearing on the slowly decomposing heavyweights. I know this is common sense, but no, it's not, really. I had earlier tried to start a seed bed out of an old drawer I found in a parking lot, but that was going slow and dry. Here it was a few weeks after I started:



I started to move logs out and use them to build a supporting compost pile near my growing seed starting area. I built the pile just like I built this one out of weaving sticks, but this time I had enough logs to form "walls" with minimal effort.

Around that time, I was transferring the seedlings to little pots, and with the compost pile starting up, chickens were surely all over the place and knocking the babies over. I then used logs to secure the seedlings and press them against the old drawer. Eventually I had rows of them surrounding the drawer, growing outward, and held in place by logs.



It's not very easy to see because I've allowed this "weed" to grow over, it does a good job of protecting the seedlings from too much sun. The logs, I believe, have also contributed to the diversity of little organisms, with pretty mushrooms always coming up and convincing me of the health of the area. This log support system, and the ensuing burst of grass-herby growth surrounding it, allows me to leave seedlings during the hot days (without watering), something I've never been able to do.



You can see the drawer to the left in the above photo. Below is the compost pile, now also obscured by the weed thing, but you notice it because of the papers:



I've also placed seedlings around the compost pile so they benefit from the micro activity happening there. They are more or less hidden under the weeds. For the first time, I am able to grow tomatoes, and without fuss too!

More or less it's a system of logs-plants-logs. In some areas, where I've planted herbs into the ground, logs retain moisture as well as mulch. More on that later in this post.

In a past post I also showed how I was making above-ground mini-compost piles to be directly planted in. Well, this picture, which I posted last month--



--gives a pretty good idea of the starting point. Logs arranged on hard earth, leaves dumped inside. Continuous leaf dumping, as well as an occasional bag of coffee grounds from Starbucks (at least we are getting something good out of them!), and it was ready to grow an atsuete or annatto plant in. Here it is today:



I put the plant in and cover the root area with the bark of some palm tree that falls apart in straight pieces. Beside the annatto plant, to the left, is some holy basil. To its right are some chives I separated from a five-year-old bunch!



Above is another one of the log triangles, this time planted with the native dayap lime, with roots covered again by fronds of a palm tree.

In some cases, I actually "mulch" by placing logs around a plant. It helps especially when the plant is sensitive to getting stepped on by chickens. The plant is also provided with considerable "coolth" and moisture from the mass of the logs. After the baby is established, you can also transfer the logs to different places (until they get progressively smaller and just sort of fall apart).

Now just to drive the utter convenience of that home, I end this with a picture of a chicken tearing up a mountain of mulch I just left around the rosal plant.

Microorganisms Again

Before I left, I decided to "bait" some microorganisms again out of the air and soil. I was feeling pretty encouraged that the avocado tree near my room, previously sickly and wilted all the time, is now doing fabulous, with healthy shiny leaves. (However, now that the trees are super established, distance is something of an issue, as they are planted a bit densely.)

What you do with microorganisms is this. Choose a good tree, take a tupperware or a lunchbox, and put a handful of rice, or a piece of bread, in. I use coconut shells, because we have obscene amounts of them from our coconut milk consumption. I secure them with a rubber band. Just make sure (if you do this) that the cover hangs over the bottom, as you don't want rain getting in.

You bury this at the foot of your chosen tree. Well, not really bury, but cover with debris. I need to secure mine well, because otherwise the chickens will eat all the rice. I suspect they did this to the other one I left by the mango tree.

After three to five days, take the rice. It should have colorful mold, not black mold. This means there is good life in it. This one had orange and green and yellow and pink. Very beautiful. Evon thought I was playing with a dead chick when I was poking this around. That is because it gets a nice fuzz going on.



You take this and put it in a glass container.



Pour molasses or mascobado sugar on it. Raw sugar is very good for this. Some people try white sugar, but I don't believe it would be as effective. You can buy panocha at the market and crush it, mix it with some water, and pour it in. I have a bottle of molasses that is expired as of last week-- I bought it to make cookies a few years ago. It tasted fine, and I don't mind if it started fermenting or something.



Pour it over the colorful rice or bread, enough to cover. They say the ratio of colorful rice to sugar should be 1:1, but I am not so strict about it.



After a week or so it should start smelling sweetish sour, kind of like your health fermented drinks. It is sure fascinating to see the change it goes throuh, as well as how well plants respond to it! When you get this mixture, take a tablespoon to one liter of water. I like to leave the water to rest for a couple of hours before applying it to the plants, just to get the little ones swimming and properly dispersed.

There ya go, it's really simple, and it is a happy procedure.

Various Growing Things

The commotion in Thailand airport messed my plans up a bit and allowed me to stay a few more days back home. So before I left town last week, I set out some rice to "bait" microorganisms, but more on that in a next post. Yesterday saw me dumping a whole lot of matter for decomposition while I am in Cambodia, a more intensive absentee garden routine than I described here. More on that in the next post, as well.

It rained some while I was gone, and some trees have gone to fruit again. I was walking around and seeing evidence of chickens having a good meal, and mainly me missing a pickling and bottling opportunity. Here is a kamias that I wanted to make into spicy pickles. It was flowering when I left, but now the fruit is probably all gone.



I've been telling myself I am going to grow some okra again, but never have the chance to spot some seeds around in the villages. Usually I nick some dried okras from residential areas and grow them, but recently people have been extra adamant about being tidy with their dried okra. But now, hey hey, a surprise one is growing by the atis tree. A couple of years ago, when we just moved in, we had lots of okra in that spot. Can't say if one seed lasted that long, but in any case, yes!



This papyrus sedge is finally having flowers again. We made an Egypt-inspired soap using its flowers from the whole expanse of the garden, and then we realized (after everyone started loved it) that the blooms only come once a year. So we had to put poppy seeds in instead.



I took this pandanus spiny plant from the beach before. I was convinced it would not grow, as it was growing on sand and rock, but here it is making its presence felt among other plants in the shade:



It is the broad kind (not the small fragrant culinary sort) that they use to weave handicrafts. Its leaves have edges that are quite a hassle to handle, but I think it is beautiful and might be planted along areas for security.

A Personal Thoughtpost

Not literally. But I'd like to sit down, light a funny cigarette, and tell you where I am now.

About two months ago, I was giving a talk somewhere, and my fellow speaker had "the answer" to farmer problems, compost woes. An organic answer, a natural one, etc. etc. And so these were microbes cultured in a controlled laboratory, guaranteed to give your soil a cocktail of vital nutrients. The technology originated in Japan, and used a type of mineral only found in several places in the Philippines. This entrepreneur had found a cheap source, refused to divulge where.

Beside me was a farmer who also spoke at the forum. He was an organic farmer who taught communities to cultivate their own indigenous microorganisms (in fact, his organization taught the farmer who taught me). We three got into a discussion about microorganisms.

The problem, entrepreneur said, with "capturing" microorganisms from the wild, is that you can never be sure of their composition, and you might end up "doing it wrong". The farmer replied that it seemed to work excellently for all the farmers they train. I attested to this observation.

And so the other dude left our circle in sort of a huff.

Microorganisms are alive. They are everywhere. I do not believe that any place lacks the ability to heal itself, create conditions for health and yield. If your land is lacking in microorganisms, take a walk or drive, and you can capture those from the healthy biodiverse areas around-- you do not need lab tests to tell they are healthy. You don't need to worry about bad bacteria, you can observe the color of the mold. There is "bad" bacteria everywhere. It is only bad if your immunity is weak. It will only take over if factors let it. We are not after eliminating bad bacteria, but creating cheap and sustainable ways that can limit them from dominating.



Take the microorganisms, take them from different places of your area. Look at the land, observe the species, observe how the soil retains water, how the plants interact with it. Enriching the land is only expensive if you do not cultivate the correct and self-supporting environment to support that health.

In the same manner, if we want health, and we look towards the lab, we may have revelations. But I believe that the value of examining persons who are not wealthy, but healthy-- and examining personal, environmental, cultural, and social conditions that make them so-- will outweigh the tests on those who are engineered by scientific doctrine, and products of expensive lifestyles.

This is because I do not believe that people lack the ability to heal themselves-- except perhaps the acutely ill, whose bodies have passed a line. Difficulty begins once they begin to consider themselves separate from the environment around them. Not in an abstract way, but once they lose the supporting flora around them (plants to eat, to heal, to give clean air), either their health suffers, or their wallets do. They begin to spend loads of money on supplements and herbal tea. This is preventative medicine that costs.

It is not enough to purchase everything organic. You need to build systems around you that make it easy to eat good, cheap, and healthy food and ecosystem services. If you want it cheap and easy enough, your push for this kind of system will extend to the social and structural systems around you.

Same goes for plants. Do you want good compost? Grow easy trees that give you biomass. It is only expensive to grow organic when you are not planning for biomass to support your efforts, hedge funds in the form of diversity, or little animal friends to do some work for you.

Commercial organic medicine, superfoods, fertilizer-- are only one notch better than chemical ones. Most especially if they are expensive and no cheap options exist.



The nineties trend (only now seeing cross-disciplinary migration) of systems thinking is the meat and bones of the once-abstract notions of interconnectedness. Systems thinking or design thinking leads to being creative in your own context. It is what makes places interesting, and diverse. Enough of brute force. Inside people, in the soil, there are things that don't even need to be summoned. We just have to understand them and design smartly, so they can make songs with the factors that want to, as well.

These thoughts will guide my work.

Tick Treats

Dog blood must taste good, because we have another garapata (tick) wave now. Sarge brought the ticks in, and so now I am busy making some proven "tick brew" to rinse them with. More on that later. The point is that sometimes when I pet Oakley, I feel a fat stuffed tick (like a soaked raisin), and pull it out. I get a bit obsessed (like popping bubble wrap) and do it until I've got enough in my hand, I call the chickens with clucking sounds.

They know I've got either worms or fruit or something for them. In any case, one animal's parasite is another's chibog!



They love the stuff. And can you just imagine? It must taste to them like a chocolate truffle with rich ganache in the middle. Or some onde-onde. Some people may think it absolutely nauseating, but our dogs aren't bathed or powdered with chemicals, so it's just insect matter and blood.

An added thing is that fallen ticks climb to the tops of grasses and plants to wait for a someone or some animal to hitchhike on, and walking-round chickens can solve that.

Chickens Are Great (and Confusing)!

Some stories and tips! It seems like only yesterday that new mother hen Meng (above, named after my favorite tsokolate joint) was a chick. Now she has seven little chickies of her own! I woke up to the little twitting sounds last week. I checked in the kaing and true enough, there were heads sticking out! We moved the kaing to the empty aviary (birds set free) so that the little ones will not be eaten by cats (or the dog, more of that later).

It is actually a bit of a confusing story here. Before this "wave" of chicks, Puti's eggs had exploded, and I moved Uldarica's eggs into her nest, on dried neem leaves to combat further infection of eggs. I thought they were Puti's eggs that she laid in a different place (our barrel of mucuna beans).



Turns out, Uldarica had already started laying some of her own! I stopped transferring them to Puti's nest, and after a few days, she promptly began sitting on the beans.



And so we had two batches of eggs hatch, both Uldarica's, at almost the same time (few days difference). Puti (the white one) thought they were her own chicks, but she was actually an adoptive mama to two. These were the two mamas with two chicks each:





Both the chicks in the last photo above are dead. Only very recently, after they had grown to about 5-6 inches long already, one was eaten by a cat, and the other, was bitten by Sarge yesterday. I heard it crying and turned around and startled the large puppy, and he laid it down. I carried it (it started flapping wildly and was still drenched in saliva) to a safe spot and later gave it to Evon for safekeeping. It eventually died, with a bone sticking out of its neck.

Sad fact of life. Well, that is why they lay so many eggs. There are so many more predators and dangers if you are small and probably tasty.

Since her two chicks have died, Uldarica has started making laying sounds again.

Anyway, as I mentioned, after hatching, we now place the chicks in our aviary so they can scratch around the ground under. After they grow larger, we put them in this movable cage that we shift around the garden, so that new area may be conquered for worms and fruit and such:



Chickens are great and are good friends for making your garden nice and healthy. They distribute wild fruit and vine all over the place. Eventually, if you don't clean up, chicken-friendly plants will start to grow. Also be sure to have a lot of places of refuge like thorny bushes that have hollow hiding spaces in the middle.

Absentee Gardener Plot Startup

I've been gone from the garden. But nature never sleeps, so here are some things I do to make use of the continuous activity that happens while I'm running around. They involve preparing plots in a pretty throw-together manner:

Collecting dead plant material from everywhere. This is nothing new to my blog, but if you're gonna be around subdivisions, watch out for biomass that people are throwing away. This makes you a gatherer on the go, it only takes 2 minutes to toss those into the trunk. I mean logs and leaves.

Arranging or dumping these strategically. You want to create situations where decomposition and explosions of fecundity are likely to occur with minimal intervention. I arrange the logs (they are palm logs so they are really stringy inside) into triangles and squares and dump leaves inside, tell them to throw all compost there. Our chickens will mix them about.

Throwing seeds, transplanting, then growing some babies in pots. While preparing these mini-plots, you want to get small ones going. I get some herbs that are growing already, and recently got some legumes in. Ocassionally I throw some of the composting leaves in, to get the microparties started.

In the next coming days I will get some in. Really, instead of just giving up and saying, "sorry garden", about 5 minutes a day prepares me for a day or two of solid fun.

Hornworm

This caterpillar of a moth was caterpillaring around the lagundi plant. As I touched it, it started thrashing around like a wild woman. Its skin is hard, not at all like you expect, as you think it would be like a marshmallow. It is a hornworm, sometimes called a unicorn caterpillar, for obvious reasons. A curious little creature.