Re: gardening in the humid tropics of the Philippines.

Amazon 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. Tweet