gardening in the humid tropics of th... 
charkee
9 y
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I have gardened in California, Missouri, Iowa, the sandy soils of the central American tropical rain forests. The soils have ranged from loamy sand to clays.
Currently I am gardening in the Philippines on the island of Luzon. This is the worst soil I have ever worked with. It is a sandy loam with gravel of volcanic cinders and chunks of hardened ash. The drainage is excellent.
However disease is a real problem. Early blight wipes the tomatoes out, crown blight killed all of the papayas. Root knot nematodes destroyed the eggplants, okra and carrots. Bugs chewed the chinese cabbage to smithereens and white flies got everything else.
Beans all died from some unidentified illness that wiped them all out in a matter of 4 days.
Corn and sorghum seem to do well. Taro looks great.
It is difficult here to find garden supplies. You can get tools, but no handles. Can't find handles anywhere. I ended up using tree branches for hoes and luckily I found the last shovel with a handle in an Ace hardware south of Manila.
Buying a garden hose is a real challenge. I finally found one that was better than terrible and the couplings don't fit any faucets here. I had to cut of the couplings and put on native ones only do discover they is no way to clamp them to the hose. so I used bailing wire and twisted it tight around the couplings to keep them from leaking.
The only source I can find for OM is coconut lumber sawdust. It composts quickly in this humid tropical climate. I'm trying to build up the OM and am thinking of mono cropping corn to starve out the nematodes and get the double benefit of additional OM from their stalks.
I have added some char to the soil along with wood ashes as I assume the soils are acidic. N levels seem okay, there are no soil tests available, so I gotta hope its in the OM I can obtain.
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- Re: gardening in the humid tropics o... sdrt123
9 y
2,153
- Re: gardening in the humid tropics o... #86381
9 y
2,570
This is a reply to # 2,239,800Amazon does ship, but then there is a hefty import tax. I haven't ordered anything for this reason. In addition the post office here has lost about 50% of my snail mail, so it is taking a risk to order stuff.
I'm rather surprised by the lack of vegetable diversity here, its all just eggplant, tomatoes, onions, yard long beans, chinese cabbage, sweet pototoes, taro, only one type of winter squash and carrots. The onions and carrots are not grown in this area, but at higher altitudes where it is cooler.
The only beans seen here are mung beans. But in some market booths there are as many as 12 different types of rice. Most of it is polished rice and not reinforced with vitamins. There is some red and brown rice and that is sold at a premium. The sticky rices are the most expensive, they are used mostly for confections.
The tomatoes in the markets look sickly, they are a little bigger than cherry tomatoes and often they are still green. I learned that the larger tomatoes do not form here because the night time temperatures are too high.
I brought some seeds with me, but the soil diseases quickly killed everything within about a month. The only seed that grew successfully was some white sorghum that I purchased in a market in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. (about the same longitude).
Another issue that was unexpected, the ants here love to eat seeds and they ate all of my hulless barely and oat seed that I had been breeding and selecting for over a decade.
- Re: gardening in the humid tropics o... sdrt123
9 y
2,248
Organic Colon Cleanse
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This is a reply to # 2,239,869that's disappointing. from what i've read most of the pest problems are caused by poor soil structure, lack of minerals, lack of compost, etc and it seems to be true in my experience.
Sounds like you can't get compost there affordably and probably there isn't the equipment there to make any on a larger scale such as grinding up tree branches like the guy in the Back to Eden film so the only thing i could think of is hugulkulture. Seems like it might be a way to add a lot of nutrients to the soil without too much effort if you have access to some trees or logs.
- Re: gardening in the humid tropics o... charkee
9 y
2,358
Organic Colon Cleanse
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This is a reply to # 2,240,382I'm able to get sawdust from a lumber shop and ashes and charcoal from a restaurant. We have been piling on the sawdust and I'm careful not to overdo the ashes. There is a surprising amount of charcoal which I ground up for terra preta.
Corn seems to grow well, so we will grow several back to back crops of sweet corn to help starve out the root knot and build up more OM.
MY wife grew up on a mountain farm with those neat looking rice terraces. She said they never had disease problems. The soils there are a red clay, slick as grease when wet. The subsoil is a white silt (I thought it was silt), but actually it is a rather low fertile volcanic ash packed hard into a subsoil, what looks like a silt pan in the USA. Where it is exposed not much will grow.- Re: gardening in the humid tropics o... sdrt123
9 y
2,213
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This is a reply to # 2,240,432i never tried charcoal and was always told to be careful with using too much ashes. best product i used was a Kelloggs "Compost" that was really more of a tiny woodchip/sawdust kind of product. i dont think it added much in the way of nutrients but it was great for soil structure in that it preventing clumping/hardpan, allowed excellent aeration, good moisture holding capacity and made it easy for plants to send roots deep into the soil. to this i added a regular type of compost (Supersoil), steer manure and blood meal, bone meal etc. i was able to get all this stuff from Home Depot, heheh.
unless you have a very large area of garden i dont think the original soil makes much difference as long as you can get the amendments. what about dairies as a source of manure? do they have rice straw avail there cheap? other agricultural by-products or waste products that have organic matter?
btw if most people are growing only those select few crops then it might be the case that insect pests for any other crops are not too prevalent and you might have success with those?- Re: gardening in the humid tropics o... charkee
9 y
2,713
This is a reply to # 2,240,516rice straw and hulls are available some times of the year. I'm in an urban setting and it is crowded here. I'm lucky that I have one of the few homes with a garden area. I joke about that here. I tell people they can still grow spaghetti or if they are interested in livestock-snakes.
- Re: gardening in the humid tropics o... charkee
9 y
2,713
- Re: gardening in the humid tropics o... sdrt123
9 y
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- Re: gardening in the humid tropics o... charkee
9 y
2,358
- Re: gardening in the humid tropics o... sdrt123
9 y
2,248
- Re: gardening in the humid tropics o... #86381
9 y
2,570
- Re: gardening in the humid tropics o... sdrt123
9 y
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