The Palawan, Philippines garden

Couldn't wait any longer. Just had to plant something.

Soil not what I really wanted, but will do for now. Local soil, compost from the agricultural dept of a local college, rice hulls, bat guano.

I've got a limited amount of vermiculite coming and will lose the local soil for the next set of plantings.

Planted
1 bucket of sungold cherry tomato
3 buckets of chard
6 buckets of red russian kale
2 buckets thai basil
2 buckets of a mild smooth mustard. In the south we call this hanover salad.



The shade cloth cage is to keep the little birds from snapping off the seedlings when they come up.
Buckets are portable and can be moved to the new house site in Jan. May have to take the tomato early if it does as well as sungolds did in NC. Tomatoes are very hard to grow here because the temp stays warm all the time. Cherry tomatoes do better than others. Higher in the mountains are better for tomatoes.

Kay

That is wonderful Kay!  You can't not garden no matter where you are, lol!

I take it by warm you mean HOT!

Marc Iverson wrote:I take it by warm you mean HOT!

There are 2 seasons here, hot and wet and hotter and dry. We are headed to the hotter and dry.

Kay

I have hanover salad sprouts.

Kay

I've got 5 tomato sprouts, kale spouts and chard sprouts. no basil yet and just planted collards and lettuce yesterday

I had to move the seedling out from under the shade cloth right now. They were getting too leggy. I think being under a tree and the shade cloth was too much. And they did get beat down in some down pours earlier. If they perk up I'll try to transplant some to more buckets.

Kay

Went to the mall today and was looking around the hardware store.  Guess what I found, vermiculite.  125 peso per 2 liter - about $3.  Compost is 52 pesos per 2 kilo also about 2 liters.  Guess it's a good thing I used vermiculite at $20 per 4 cu ft as packing material on some boxes I shipped.  I may eventually be able to have a 4x4 bed,  We also get the compost from the local agricultural college at 10 pesos per kilo.  Found a fish emulsion/sea kelp/bat guano liquid fertilizer to add to my existing buckets of growing medium.  The grass blazer is coming around 15 Dec to cut down the lot beside the new place.  I want to get some fencing to build a compost heap and have all the greenery put there.  When we move in, EVENTUALLY, kitchen scraps can be added.  

I have 4 sungold cherry tomatoes about 6" high, some kale and tendergreen mustard greens that have their 4th set of leaves, some leggy chard with only seed leaves but still alive.  The lettuce and basil never sprouted, but I replanted yesterday.  Also yesterday I planted some Homestead 24 tomato seeds (deter and hybrid wilt resistant) and some armenian and a japanese cukes.  So much of this is experimental.  Currently growing in a low sun area, but the sun is soooo hot here.  I'm trying moving the buckets into various areas of sunlight to see where I can eventually have a viable garden.

Kay

Sounds like quite an adventure, Kay. I'm out of the loop about how it all got started, except I think you said both daughters-in-law were Filipina, but I'll be interested to hear how it continues.

Kay,  Do you have a current photo of the buckets and seedlings?   

Marc Iverson wrote:Sounds like quite an adventure, Kay.  I'm out of the loop about how it all got started, except I think you said both daughters-in-law were Filipina, but I'll be interested to hear how it continues.

This is an experiment to see if I want to make this my winter home. It's cheap and with the extended family, I'm not "by myself". Medical care from US trained Docs is available at a reasonable cost, and is reimbursable under my insurance. There is a hospital run by the Seventh Day Adventists that offers good service. None of my kids have room for me for extended time plus they live where it's cold. I hate ice and snow, and I'm tired of being alone in my big house. So we shall see.

Kay

sanderson wrote:Kay,  Do you have a current photo of the buckets and seedlings?   

sungold cherry tomatoes

kale

tendergreen mustard

pitiful chard

1 day old cukes



kay

walshevak wrote:

Marc Iverson wrote:Sounds like quite an adventure, Kay.  I'm out of the loop about how it all got started, except I think you said both daughters-in-law were Filipina, but I'll be interested to hear how it continues.

This is an experiment to see if I want to make this my winter home.  It's cheap and with the extended family, I'm not "by myself".  Medical care from US trained Docs is available at a reasonable cost, and is reimbursable under my insurance. There is a hospital run by the Seventh Day Adventists that offers good service.   None of my kids have room for me for extended time plus they live where it's cold.   I hate ice and snow, and I'm tired of being alone in my big house.  So we shall see.

Kay

If it works out for you, it will be a nice work-around for getting year-round gardening!

GG

Obviously somebody likes Sungold tomatoes.

I saw a bottle garden video that showed a big backyard bottle garden in the Philippines. One of the things I liked seeing was all the different greens they grew which I never see in the states, and many of which I didn't know anything about. Do you like greens much? This might be an opportunity for you to try lots of new locally-popular greens, both the eating and the growing. Maybe you could even find local favorites, greens or not, you'd like to bring back and grow back in the States?

I always got a kick out of going to different Asian restaurants and having no idea what kind of greens I was eating, but really liking each new discovery.

12/16/2013  volunteer tomatoes, basil, a pepper plant and malibar spinach
tomato was half this size when I arrived in Mid Oct.






1/4/2014  Ripening tomatoes

cukes


cukes


4 sungold tomatoes  1 dieing


buckets of kale and hanover salad

Wow Kay! I am soooo jealous! I can't wait to get started this year. It's posts like these that make me rethink starting seeds now... But I won't....

Garden site with shade cloth  Greenery shelf to left, bins with more kale, some bok choi and trying some onions for scallion use.  
Bell pepper in the bucket and cukes to the right.  Yep those are the cukes and greenery planted in Nov.  Look at how small the chard is and how few plants survived.  We had one meal of kale and have been using the hanover salad as lettuce on sandwiches.[size=12.727272033691406][/size]

The first sungold tomato ripening.  Pick tomorrow. Only 2 plants survived and they are riddled with leafminers in spite of soap spray.



tomato patch  2 sungold cherry and 3 Jan planted bigger tomatoes. 



water barrel with some yellow squash plants ready to transplant into pots in shade cage.  planted more hanover salad, more bok choi and some leftover turnip seeds a few days ago in the bins.  some are sprouting.  hope I can keep them growing.  Not had very good luck so far.  Sprouts just don't thrive.



The second cuke.  First one was 1/4 this size.




I'm very disappointed in the growth of things even with with fish emulsion feedings.

Kay

Kay, You've done a lot of work getting a garden going. Can any of this be used to get a jump start on next year's winter visit? Maybe next trip you can use peat moss as your packing material, then the following year, bagged compost!   

I'm definitely  sending another 4 cu ft bag of vermiculite.  All bins will be moved when move takes place later in the year. There has been ideal growing temps for most of my stay -mid to upper 80s F during the day and mid 70s F at night.  Got down to a very unusual 69 F one night and folks were cold.  Jeans and long sleeve shirts and even a jacket or two were spotted that morning.  I blame the Indonesian volcano eruptions. The sun is very strong though and I cannot stand in it without a hat or some kind of shade. Equatorial intensity.

I pushing for a compost pile when the relocation takes place, but still will have problems getting any kind of manure.  

Kay

[size=15.454545021057129]Interesting phenomenon here in Philippines.  My 2 remaining tomatoes (sungold cherry) don't grow suckers. No side growth what so ever.  I was hoping to get some suckers to root and make more plants.  They look like the best pruned tomatoes growing up one stick but I have never touched them.  They are producing some fruit but not like I'm used to getting.  And weather for the past 3 months has been good  upper 80s during the day and mid 70s at night. Starting to change to much higher heat about now.  I have 3 non cherry plants growing but no blooms yet.[/size]

[size=15.454545021057129]Same with my cukes and the plant can only support 1 fruit at a time.  I had 3 one inch long babies on the cuke but only the bottom one swelled and grew big enough to eat.  After I picked it, the next one up started swelling.  Now the 3rd one is swelling, and 2 more babies are waiting in the wings.[/size]

[size=15.454545021057129]And all the stems on everything are puny.  They just don't thicken up and the plant can't support itself.   Been using fish emulsion every 3 weeks because I don't trust the compost I got.[/size]


[size=15.454545021057129]Finally got kale and hanover salad greens big enough to have a meal, but had to mix them to make enough.  Only 1 bell pepper seed germinated out of a whole package of seeds planted at various times.  Plant is struggling against bugs.  None of the hot pepper seeds I brought from my NC plants germinated.  Must have planted at least 50 over the time I've been here.[/size]


[size=15.454545021057129]Kay[/size]

Wow I guess I'm not the only one who had terrible germination problems. Sorry to hear your peppers were such a bust.

Dunno what's going on, but every paragraph in your last post is surrounded by HTML code in brackets, size and /size. Doesn't do anything; words are just sitting there.

Marc Iverson wrote:Dunno what's going on, but every paragraph in your last post is surrounded by HTML code in brackets, size and /size.  Doesn't do anything; words are just sitting there.

+1 Marc

They appeared when I hit the send button.  I tried to edit out, but they don't show on the "working" or preview.

Happens every time I try to make corrections in the text or add a word or two.  Some of my other posts have come up the same way after editing.
Kay

That's weird. Doesn't seem like something a browser would do automatically. Are you typing in a word processing program and then cutting and pasting your text into the forum, or writing directly into the forum software? It kinda looks like the sort of added code that a word processor or similar program adds automatically and invisibly.

Nope, direct typing.