Vagabond Soles: Tropical Permaculture in the Philippines: Update 3

It's now been about a month and a half since we began our garden project in my dad's back yard here in Borongan, Eastern Samar. So far, there have been a number of set backs and frustrations, but quite a few things are going according to plan.

One of the most frustrating things for me is a problem that's really only specific to my particular plot of land here: trash. Every time I want to start a new bed, I start digging, only to find that for every cubic foot of soil, there's another cubic foot of trash that I've got to dispose of first. I've filled up about 4 of those huge rice sacks full of trash in a single week. It's like they've been using the lot as a landfill for several years now. I'm not here to judge. If you send your trash to a landfill, you're just throwing it in someone else's back yard anyway. And in fact, from all the trash that does decompose, the soil does become a lot richer. It's just a pain in the ass to have to sift through every spadefull of dirt and separate the trash.

Creeper Xmas tree, featuring sitao, ampalaya, and sigadellas

Another set back has been the climate, which brings us to this week's first lesson (one I had known before getting started): stick with native crops and your life will be much easier. Here in Eastern Samar, the weather seems to vacillate between two extremes. It's either blazing hot under the harsh equatorial sun, or it's a torrential downpour. There's not a lot of in between. Most European crops don't like either of those extremes, so growing them is possible, but it's a lot more difficult. Unfortunately, I started with a bunch of packs of seed that I got at hardware stores, and most of those are non-native varieties. So that's what's up.

Most of the crops you'd think would fail miserably in the tropics have done just that—cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, onions. I got them to sprout, but they didn't last more than a week or two, even protected from the sun and rain in the nursery. Others seem to have mixed results. I've got sweet peas that are doing ok, climbing up bamboo and more than a foot high, but I've lost about half of them to the heavy rains before they got to the climbing stage. My zucchini seemed to be doing great—it gets broad leaves and a thick stem really quickly—but after transplanting, they only lasted a week or two before being devoured by these orange beetle looking things, and maybe picking up a bacterial wilt. The onions I've tried to plant from the seed packs are very difficult to keep alive, but I've planted quite a few of the little mini onions available at the market here, and they seem to be doing great.

Sweet peas

Meanwhile, the crops well-suited to the tropics are unsurpsingly doing well. My star performer is a sitao plant that's climbed higher than me already, and it's already starting to produce some beans. If you haven't seen it, sitao is like green beans, except each bean is like 2 or 3 feet long. The ampalaya (bitter melon) is doing similarly well. I've got sweet corn and white corn, and both are doing great with thick stalks and broad leaves. My eggplant and chilis seem to be doing fine. I only planted a few kangkong plants, but it hasn't been troubled a bit by the typhoon rains. And the cucumber plants seem to be doing great too. They've got big broad leaves and they're producing flowers already (I'm not sure if that detracts from their fruiting. . .).

The worm bin is doing fine. I think there are more worms now, because they go through waste a lot faster. There are also some maggots in there now, but the bin is outside so they're not really hurting anything, and I figure it just processes the waste quicker. I'm starting to think I've been overthinking the compost thing, though. The compost heap is also doing well. It's almost fully decomposed only about five weeks later, I haven't really maintained it much. The thing is, everything decomposes so fast here in the tropics, I think it's a little unnecessary. I can just walk around the yard and pick up the dead leaves, throw them into the beds, and within a week or two they've decomposed and been absorbed into the soil.

Peanuts going gangbusters. Tomato and cantelope on either side.

Those orange beetle things I mentioned are a real pain. Researching on the internet, I haven't found what they are exactly, but they seem similar to cucumber beetles in the plants they like to eat and because some of the plants seem to develop a bacterial wilt after being terrorized by them. They've destroyed my zucchinis, nearly destroyed my watermelons, and they're big fans of the canteloupe and pumpkin too. I've tried companion planting with onion and garlic—seems to make no difference whatsoever. I've been handpicking and squishing them, as it seems that might be the most effective solution. We've got a few chickens running around here, but I think they do more harm than good. I might look at setting up a pond in the future to encourage frogs, but it would also encourage mosquitos, and I've got plenty of them already.

Watermelon and some orange beetle terrorists

I've finished another bed with bamboo stakes, and we threw down some gravel paths so it's not such a mud bath when it rains. I'm keeping a constant flow of new plants going in the nursery, so I'll continue to have new stuff to transplant, and hopefully start harvesting some stuff in a month or two. And Leia's adopted two gnarly, scroungy jungle puppies that sleep outside our back door now. That's it for now.