Pesticide regime on eggplant, trials
Bt
Methoxyfenozide, Intrepid Dow
Carbosulfan, Bifenthrin
Azadirachtin
Michelle Obama plants a vegetable garden for the White House with school kids. I heard about it while reading about the dinner the Obamas served the prime minster of India when he visited the White House recently. They served greens and vegetable from the garden. Also, they used salsify? Apparently like dandelion but the roots. The White House garden also has a bee hive, which they took honey from to prepare the deserts.
are they harvesting sweet potato? I've never seen it grown in the USA
The White House project was spearheaded by a group called WHO, White House Organic Farm Project. I think I actually recall the petition and must have just thought at that time, “what a nice idea, but I doubt they’d push it through.” Well looks like I’m the fool.
What's going on here, there's ZERO weeds and not even a sprig of tricky grass rhizome volunteering. I guess they have 30 gardeners tweezering the place clean every day, but wait! See that kid on the left with the weeding fork? That's the secret, children!
According to WHO, there was once a flock of sheep living on the White House lawn. Jefferson was a plant breeder and Mrs. Roosevelt planted a victory garden on the WH grounds.
I am so incredibly proud of the Obamas.
bitter gourd
Looking a little parched, by the bitter gourds are sprouted and already putting out their true leaves. The soil around them is well prepared (loose and mounded). There is also plenty of compost in the mounds and lots of sod residue. The parcel had been used as pasture so I believe there is plenty of potassium (though I was not able to get the area tested).
trellises mostly done. we need to string vertical lines and drape fishing netting over the top
Ideally I’d like to mulch the area but we simply cannot afford the man hours to do that. The parcel is one hectare total, and that’s going to yield tons of fruits in a few months.
nice big leaves, unfortunately very delicious to leaf hoppers - of which we are constantly battling
The above is our more recently transplanted eggplants. They were transplanted 50 days ago and will be ready to harvest in the next week or so. This field was well prepared and the weed pressure is relatively low. I am also recognizing the importance of smaller fields in terms of management. Since everything is manually done, the scale of parcels has a great effect on crew morale.
sort of hot peppers
Right next to the more recently transplanted eggplants are our peppers. These guys were transplanted 60 days ago and have been yielding very high quality fruits for the past two weeks. The peppers are mild and fleshy. They are also mildly sour. They are one of my most favorite spice/veg here.
matured eggplants being weeded and sprayed
In a neighboring property we have eggplants transplanted 70 days ago and they have been yielding fruits for the past two weeks. There is unfortunately a growing population of leaf hoppers, which we are stepping up our defenses against. Much of the pressure was a result of the corn and rice harvest about two weeks ago. The mango trees planted throughout the parcel are also havens for the insects. We are going to start spraying everything down with a mix regime of pesticides applied at high dosages because our neighbors have, unfortunately, a habit of under applying pesticides and as a result we have very resilient pests to contend with. We are going to evaluate push pull systems using okra as the draw and lemon grass or onions as the push. Leaf hoppers do not attack peppers, which is another reason why we are expanding our hectarage in that vegetable over eggplants (whose prices are prone to huge fluctuations).
our tomatoes no longer have bottom end rot or fruit worms!
These tomatoes are over 70 days old since transplant and are cranking out fruits prodigiously. A couple of weeks ago we were having serious problems with bottom end rot and fruit worms (which arrived from neighboring corn fields). We applied about 50 grams of lime to each plant and that seemed to solve the bottom end rot problem (which is a result of low calcium). The fruit worms were dealt with using pesticides, which will have to continue because we do not have pheromone lures for tomato fruit worm (corn ear worm). Hopefully the influx of the pests will continue to decrease with the time between the last corn harvest and the tasseling of neighboring corn fields. We are otherwise lucky to not have an infestation of other tomato worms (though by the picture you can see some leaf miners). Primarily there are no leaf hoppers = my major nightmare.
here's the first batch, some weather checking but salable
Okay I am totally spoiled by heirloom tomatoes. These guys are thick skinned, small and kind of on the boring end the spectrum. They are more sweet/sour than those commercial hot house tomatoes in the USA, but the texture can’t be helped with so much skin and no flesh.
some squash
We planted less than a hectare of open pollinated squash a while back and the rains really stunted the vines. We weren’t expecting the plants to persist, but they did and they even produced fruits. Okay, so not very many fruits, but the majority of them are decently sized and sold. We are switching up to hybrid squash and are going to seriously mound and fertilize with composted manure. One hectare ought to yield a couple tons of fruits, which ought to be a sight.
lunch
He turned into very good pinapaitan (bitter gourd & offal soup), kaldereta (tomato goat stew), and some other boiled cartilage/meat thing with ginger and lime. My fondest memory of this guy was when him and his sister were lambs and they were being chased by a puppy who thought they were also puppies. Goat meat restaurants here are called Kambings.
looking good
Here are our 15 day old watermelons already vining. They are also flowering already, which drives me nuts even though I know everything likes to flower super early here and bear fruit while still growing vegetatively. We are going through and pinching off the flowers/fruits while encouraging proper vine growth for maximum coverage and to ensure two giant fruits per plant.
watermelon field
Here is 1.7 hectares of watermelons planted 15 days ago. This soil on this field has poor texture and has lots of morning glory and mimosa weeds. I know this field was once planted over to corn and subsequently abandoned (this pretty much means its very used up). We laid a significant amount of composted manure, rice husks and fertilized heavily. The plants on this field are slow to grow by comparison to the other field of watermelons, which was planted on a parcel that had been green manured with mungbeans. The green manure field, however had a long fallow period as it was all armorseko (pasture grass) and had a better tilth even before green manuring. We’ll wait and see how well the melons do on both fields.
eggplant with volunteer mung beans. surprisingly the weed pressure is very low as compared against other fields
So a few months ago we planted a field in mung beans and that field was disked under for eggplants. The eggplant transplants failed on half of the field as a result of the unusually hot dry weather. The failed areas were then replanted to watermelons and the remaining eggplants were allowed to mature. They are still fairly patchy so we are going to test some rows of bonito (crawling) bitter gourds in between them.
watermelons in the mounds and mung beans volunteers in inter-rows
empty row were eggplants were supposed to be, we'll put bonito bitter gourd there instead. mung beans grew back very nicely
This is a purely qualitative assessment, but it seems like the mung bean field has more vigorous plant growth. Primarily, I think the tilth of the soil is improved. I have no idea how much nutrients were mined by the legume covercrop, but we can assume some N.
watermelons planted into sown mung beans
sown mungbeans. the coverage is not so great but the seeds were old and were some rotten
There was a lot of volunteer mungbeans growing up between the watermelons and the eggplants. They do not seem to be competing with the plants as the mung beans are low growing though their leaf area is much larger than the prior mung bean stand. I am pretty sure this is a result of the phosphorous fertilizer we have put in the ground for the cash crop.
The velvet beans are taking off. I am excited to see what they look like in three months. At this moment they are 1 1/2 months old. I would have thought they’d be bigger, but there was a lot of rain and that must have slowed them down.
Okay this is my attempt at an old Saveur magazine recipe I found in my partner’s junk stack the other day. I had the whole day to myself so I decided that it was going to be filled by two things: gardening and cooking. Perfect housewifey shit while my boy’s out breadwinning and I’m vacationing.
hearty stew with hearty rye bread
So the recipe is pretty simple. I didn’t really follow the Saveur instructions, but this is what I did instead:
- Stew beef (like two handfuls), cubed and definitely grass-fed
- 2-3 yellow onions
- 1 medium sized carrot
- 1 medium sized parsnip
- 1/2 celeriac
- 3 tomatoes
- 2 regular potatoes
- 1/4 cup bittersweet paprika (supposed to be sweet but I only got bittersweet)
- 3-4 cloves garlic
- pinch majoram
- pinch fennel (I didn’t have that so I used anise)
- bay leaf
- pinch coriander
- sage leaves
marinated the beef
Okay I didn’t need to marinate the beef, but I had time so I threw it in there with:
- sunflower oil
- left over red wine
- rosemary, thyme, tarragon, pepper, salt
I let it do its thing at room temperature, with a cover over the bowl. The rest of the day was spent cleaning out my partner’s honeysuckle fencerow and taking out the dead plants in his pots and replacing them with herbs and some cool season vegetables
Kitazawa seeds can be found at the Tokyo Fish Market on San Pablo ave. Berkeley. They are excellent, locally made, and sell lots of asian varieties
Most of the vegetables were intended to be planted last spring, but we never got around to doing it. I put some swiss chard, chinese onion greens, tarragon, coriander, and lettuce in the pots. I also found some columbine and lupine seeds, which I also planted though it was earlier than suggested but it is very temperate in San Francisco so I think they’ll be okay.
stuff to be cut up
So I cut up the tubers and cored out the tomatoes. Onions were sliced lengthwise, following the veins, and carrots were done at a diagonal. The celeriac was diced into small pieces.
its all about the onion base
Okay so I used a big heavy pot (dutch oven) and heated up a good amount of sunflower oil. Some dried peppers were thrown down with pepper and salt to toast. Sliced onions were then fried at medium heat, turned a few times then covered to cook till translucent. I then put in the beef cubes and the garlic. This is cook on high to sear the beef. Turn sparingly and cook uncovered to seal the moisture. Once lightly browned, the paprika and dried spice is mixed in and fried briefly on medium. Pour on the water and throw in the carrots, celeriac, and parsnip, bayleaf and sage. Bring this up to a boil and then reduce heat to simmer. Cover and let cook for 40 minutes or until beef is tender.
Throw in the potatoes and simmer uncovered for twenty minutes, or until potatoes are cooked. Stir in the tomatoes and simmer for two minutes. Check for flavor. Cover and let sit overnight.
So I got the chance to go back the USA for a week and since I wouldn’t be around at the end of the month, my family had an early Turkey Day.
Gobble gobble, here are some pictures from the event.
my dad cooking the bird in the bbq. He's rigged some thermal sensor thing so he can get the temperature right to like a 100th of a degree or something like that. My dad's an engineer.
Mom's putting more goodies out
Aside from the bird, we had:
- pumpkin curry soup, with a dollop of creme france (any opportunity to put more fat in something is a good thing)
- spiced sweet potatoes, apple bake
- wild rice, fruit, tuber, bean salad with coriander puree dressing
- amazing gravy made from scratch (roux and turkey extras)
- mash tatters
- steamed broccoli and brussels
- mushroomy stuffing
- pumpkin creme brule
eat eat eat!
There are no Kragen autoparts here so our solution on farm is just to weld broken things together and cram it back into place. There’s a hole in the gastank? Weld a patch on it. The steering column is loose? Hey lets weld a bar here and a bar there and tie it down. I just need to start welding giant horns to the body to complete picture. Anyway, the latest problem with the shifter assembly was too much for us so we took it to the Kia mechanic in the city. They complained it was going to be really hard and so I let them quote me some ridiculous amount (figures that means a quality job?) Turned out to be a bust since I went back to pick up the truck and discovered that all they did was weld shit together. And… the truck didn’t shift anyway. I went and got lunch to cool off and then went back to talk about what needed to happen: change the cables, change the bolts, and see if the pressure plate is also part of the problem. Hopefully the truck will be back in service this afternoon. If not, we still have carabao to move things around.
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Here’s some pictures of my trip to Laguna to check on a potential site for a second vegetable farm. It is a Christian charity that provides elementary through university education for deaf kids, which is interested in partnering with us.
I am so going to hell
They are offering five to twenty hectares of cleared and uncleared forest land for cultivation. Okay, now don’t get all excited. The late serial (“old growth”) areas are preserved and the areas proposed for cultivation are only early secondary regeneration (logged less than 10 years ago). My point being that the logged areas are probably already screwed anyway so lets just grow stuff on it. Then again, I don’t know anything about tropical forests so I figured if we ever think on leasing the land from the school we’d hire an agriforester to give us a full assessment as well as a management regime for the wooded areas (logging for firewood is very common and a fact of life here).
Here are the REAL pictures of the place.
Well here’s a diagram to help understand:
Does that rhyme? The local distributor didn’t know what I was talking about when I mentioned BT. Their organic fertilizer producer said that he got cultures from Uni. Los Banos, but I believe he misinterpreted me and was actually talking about microbial sprays to hasten composting.
BT proteins
Anyway. I was glad to have looked up the Fertilizer, Pesticide Authority and from their list, here are some probable manufacturers or importers in the Philippines for B. thurengensis.
- Biostadt Philippines, Inc. registered under the trade name, “Halt” and is supposedly the var. Kurstaki
- Cropking Chemicals, Inc. “DIPEL WP” & “XENTARI WDG”
- Tropi-Cuke, Inc. “XENTARI WDG”
I’ve met with a rep from Biostadt before, but I was so adamant against using their stupid auxin granules in the soil that I didn’t bother saving their contact. Speaking of stupid.
Here’s a schematic on the activation and action of the BT protein in the insect gut.
The toxin kills the insect by causing massive internal hemorrhaging. The protein is also only dissolved in the uniquely alkaline pH of insect guts and is only activated by insect digestive enzymes and depending on the strain of BT, can only undergo additional conformation changes when binding with specific sites on specific ranges of insect hosts. In this way BT is completely non toxic to us.
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Okay and then also on the list is the registered chemical for the pheromone traps marketed by East West Seeds. Good, it turns out to be the acetal analog opposed to the hydroxyl:
E-11 HEXADECEN-1-01+E-11 HEXADECENYL
More information on pheromone blend optimization, “Female Sex Pheromone of Brinjal Fruit and Shoot Borer, Leucinodes orbonalis Blend Optimization” I know, I really should sign up for my home university alumni library subscription so I can actually access all these major journals… not that I’d read more than the abstracts anyhow. Anyway, it seems like rubber septa is okay though polyurethane vials provide better release rates (faster) and thus catch more moths. I’d actually like to see how catch rates change over time and what the difference in catch is.
A practical comparison between manufacturers and trap set up can be found on a World Vegetable Center publication, “Development of an Integrated Pest Management Strategy for Eggplant Fruit and Shoot Borer in South Asia“
smarter than the average bear
Okay I’m just going to quote my friend’s Facebook post,
“a bear managed to open the door to my Jetta then lock itself in for the night. It got mad and ripped the inside up and crapped all over the place. great thing to wake up too.”
We were all involved with the Forestry Department at Uni, so everyone’s gone off to work for the Forest Service, paper mills, timber companies, and in the case of the guy above, being an on-ranch-forester. I think most people are drawn to forestry because they hate working with people. Ironically, natural resource management involves working with LOTS of different kinds of people. It is still such a small community that the society in the department immediately functions like a Frat. I’ve got no idea what Range Management community is going to be like, but I just can’t imagine them being as nuts as forestry people (range management folks at my Uni were mostly sociologists studying Native American burn regimes in California).
