Growing Durian From Seed

Many people are shocked that I'm able to grow durian from seed. I guess even people in the metropolis view it as an "exotic" fruit, as it comes mainly from the south. But I'm telling you, the fruit can grow in Metro Manila! My tito who lives in a Paranaque subdivision was able to grow the sweetest durian ever-- on land that is coastal and primarily former wetland. Or actually, typical Manila suburbs. He just dumped copious amounts of compost on it.

Anyhow, either I soak the seeds in water for a day or two, or dump them in really damp compost, and they begin to sprout little yellow things (as pictured above). These will become roots and will bear into the ground. Later on, the seeds will lift up off the ground as the stem grows. The stem will be rough and twisty like an elephant's trunk!

It's pretty easy to grow, I think if you toss it in compost it will do just fine.

Fowl!

Kuya Pidel, who works for Papa, gave him two young chickens last week. Both are white. (edit: Both are female after all!)

Kuya Pidel instructed us to keep them in a cage and feed them for a whole week before setting them lose, and in this case, my dad stuffed them into the aviary.

The aviary is about maybe 10 feet high. The floor area is long enough that I can lie on it, and wide enough that I can do a split. I haven't tried, but I can assure you this is accurate. Anyway, they spent the week scratching at the ground like it had crabs and made them, overturned all the stones, and ate all the ants. Papa would occasionally throw in cooked rice or the millet seeds that the finches eat.

Then we set them loose, and they scratched manically at the rest of the ground, this time eating a more varied assortment of insects, as well as the big fat earthworms I hope they don't eat too many of. We don't really feed them anything else. After they are done with it, the compost pile looks terrible.



Papa made me hold the female and sort of pet her until she settled down. I've only attempted this once, as they run away whenever there are people around. Except when they are basking in the sun, they get pretty relaxed:




I hope they can help with the aphids come summer, as well as the higads. I am definitely looking forward to more animals in the garden.

Flora & Fauna in Laguna, Philippines

I recently took a trip with my family to an aunt's farm in Laguna. Their fruits are still growing, although the place was surrounded by beautiful flowers and plants, some of which they were kind enough to give us to transplant at home. Some of these flowers I haven't seen before, but it was pretty cool to see butterflies and a variety of insects. Check them out :)

Lazy Person Composting

Okay, my compost isn't an open pit, it's just an open dump. It's because I am too lazy to dig, and I do enjoy just dumping the vegetable scraps in random parts of the garden.

Mostly, it's beside the duhat tree, a mess like this:



The white blobs are palitaw (glutinous rice snacks covered in grated coconut) that went bad. See the durian shell? And various other things, including seedlings growing out from fruit scrap that we toss.

So I use the beautiful black compost when I transfer the seedlings out into pots:



I will have an abundance of fruit in about 10 years. Just you wait.

Mystery Mushrooms

Mystery mushrooms have cropped up in my garden! They look like brown flowers.

I was hanging around the coconut tree when I saw this little flower-like thing on the ground. I thought it to be that part of the fruit that people turn into ornaments, the thing that holds the coconut while still on the tree. When I picked it up, I was startled to find that it was soft and actually a mushroom. I had to yank one out of the ground for inspection, and was surprised to find that the stem was really skinny and quite short.


What the hell is this thing? Anyone familiar with it?

Uray (Amaranthus spinosus)

Uray is a leafy green vegetable-weed that grows in various empty lots. Some sources say that varieties with spines are called uray while those without are called kulitis. Most say that they are one and the same. Whatever!


All I know is that, aside from having many medicinal qualities, it's very good in any dish that calls for spinach or other leafy greens. A pity so many people consider them to be garden nuisances.

My brother and I used to eat (imported and hulled) amaranth grain in place of rice, as it is high in protein as well as calcium, thus ideal for vegetarians and vegans. Manang Flor once told me that in some Bicol provinces, they collect the seeds of uray for use as a rice substitute in making native sweet delicacies. I've only seen this done with millet, and now I wonder if it really is possible with uray, as the local variety's seeds are tiny!

Some Photos

These are the flowers of the talinum I was talking about from a previous post. They are actually pinker-- the light was super bright.



A guyabano (soursop) baby! Let's hope he makes it through the rain.



Look what the higads did to my eggplant-plant!!!

Updates! Chestnuts, Manga Chupadera, Durian, OMG Higadz

And so my chestnuts continue to burst through their hairy coverings to expose those frilled-up first leaves. They are growing out in a quite exclamatory manner, all three of them. In a decade or so, I will probably have enough nuts to feed a single miserable person hiding in a dark closet on Christmas Eve. I took the seeds from the side of the road at SEARSOLIN in Cagayan de Oro.

I also have quite an abundance of Manga Chupadera seedlings. Yes, those small sweet ones that are also called supsupins, of which you can stuff three or four of into your mouth. They grew out of my compost pile, which had considerably overflowed during mango season. They are funny seedlings, with three or four stems growing out of a single seed.

The durian seeds are also looking pretty good! The babies look strange. They look like little monsters.

But really, what everyone has been talking about back here, are the itchy caterpillars or higads. They go through this horrible hairy phase before becoming moths. My eggplant-plant, once full of promise and all that, now looks like a cheap umbrella would after running into a hurricane and a teething pup. It has also eaten a lot of the vines I was supposed to use as green manure. If it's any consolation, they leave a lot of frass (caterpillar poo) behind, which is supposed to be quite nutritious. Ah, the give-and-take of nature.

Talinum (Talinum triangulare)

I've been thinking about doing a series on edible weeds. Partly because finding wild plants in your garden and pretending you are taking care of them actually is a good step to developing a sense of being a gardener. You can cook them for your friends and say "I grew that! Farm fresh, baby."

So when you spot a talinum or water leaf plant, also supposedly known as Philippine spinach, you can make a little barbeque-stick fence around it and water it lovingly. It grows pretty fast, and after a short time, it will have pink flowers that fold up and attract butterflies.

You can eat the leaves just as you would spinach, or add a few leaves randomly to any dish to get a dose of vitamin A. Or just eat the leaves as salad for some energy (hence the other nickname, leaf ginseng). Last week I added some of them to a pesto-ish sauce with sesame oil.

Growing these things is a breeze. You can snap the stems off like this:



Then stick them in the ground, water some, and soon they will be alive. Soon they will multiply like gremlins and you won't have any excuses not to eat veggies.

I personally spend some of my idle time just planting cuttings (or snappings) in random places. It grows in pretty bad soil, like that stuff that accumulates inside the holes of hollow blocks when you don't use them.

Permaculture Video

There is a pretty good permaculture video on YouTube (chopped into six parts). It is awesome and loaded with information.

Permaculture is a super way to grow a garden-- less effort and more yield. It's more a system design tool and almost a worldview. Nothing cultish, just common sense really. Very progressive stuff.

Here are the videos:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

A plus: I won't tell you where, but you will come across hilarious 80's nerd rap about permaculture somewhere there.

Updates!

Okay, okay, so I never made it back with the same regularity. The reason is, I am devoid of any visual tools to present. It is simply too dark in my shady area to use my mostly low-ISO film, and I have lost regular access to a digital camera. So before I get the idea to torture you with deficient illustration skills, I'll talk about what's going on in my garden.

It's been raining, and all of a sudden, the expanse is lush and green all over again. "My area" has been sprouting up with a good cover of common weed gatas-gatas (in Filipingrish, "milk-milk"), otherwise known as soro-soro, botoncillo, or boto-botonesan (in Filipingrish, "butt-button-ish"). Okay that last one was really bad! But apparently, this is the plant to have in your garden if you have respiratory problems, warts, or conjunctivitis.


(photo from stuartxchange)

In truth, I almost wish I had asthma so I could "make cigarettes" out of the dried leaves to smoke myself healthy. The milky sap (hence the name gatas-gatas)or latex is used for eradicating warts. This white juice can also prove helpful if you contract what my grandmother quite politically incorrectly used to call a "pedestrian disease"-- conjunctivitis, or the common sore eyes. If you are running short of friends or lovers because of thrush, you will be glad to know this can help you along as well.

So anyway, I've got this stuff growing up all over the place, and some bush sitao popped out where I must have "spilled the beans". Haha. Everything else is just growing wildly. The compost that I've been randomly tossing all over the place is decomposing faster, as the hot days come with rainy nights.

I've re-potted a whole lot of plants: pandan, basil, mint, curry tree, coleus, etc. This is a superb time to re-pot and propagate cuttings, as you don't need to worry so much about watering. Just remember to leave sensitive ones under trees. I neglected to do that with some sampaguita and now my beautiful cutting is dead.

Also, be sure to set some pails out to gather rainwater. Remember, most water drains out and overstresses the sewage systems, so help the land along (and save a bit of money too) by gathering precipitation when it is available.

Gardening Again!

It's good to be back in my chaotic, shiny-leaved, tropical-damp freewheeling garden:



After a few weeks' romp in the cold, dry, puffy-tree-leaved, relatively structured gardens of San Francisco!