Previous crops

On 20 February 2018 in Agro

I started actively planting crops last year after moving to our rented house, which is a corner lot unit and has a large backyard. My wife planted a few sawi pahit (mustard) at the side of the house, and it grew so well that we wanted to plant more types of crops.

Sawi pahit (mustard looseleaf)

I decided to focus on leafy greens while my wife tried a few other crops like corn, terung asam (sour eggplant), kailan, and recently focused to plant various herbs and veggies using pots instead of on direct soil, such as chives, coriander, mint, brazillian spinach and lowland strawberries.

The backyard area is larger than its side, so it took a few months of intermittent work to dig the ground, remove a large amount of bricks buried underneath it (I guess the leftover from the house construction), remove the weeds, and create the vegetable patch. There I planted spinach, kangkung (water convolvulus), pak choy and choy sum.

Spinach is relatively easy to grow, only that when it still young, need to be careful of pests that eat its leaves.

Kangkung (water convolvulus), however this plant has low demand in the village, as it grows easily beside the trench, and people don’t quite like it’s slimy texture.

Pak choy and choy sum don’t grow well, they usually have small size, and it’s because of the soil which is too hard and compact, should have mixed it with compost and sand to repair the soil structure to allow it to be more aerated.

Focusing on spinach only

In September 2017, I focused to plant spinach only, directly on 8 patches. Before this I germinate the plants on sowing tray before transplanting them to soil. Besides sawi pahit, spinach is one of the veggies that I can sell, because of it’s high volume of good harvest.

On the patch, make holes 10 cm apart, sprinkle a pinch of seeds, and water them daily

Put fertilizer between every 2 plants for every 2 weeks. There’s a few sweet shoot (cangkuk manis) plants can be seen behind there.

We harvest them by picking the large leaves and let the small ones to grow more, therefore we can harvest multiple times without needing to sow the new ones.

At first it seems like good idea, but after 2 months and 3 harvests, pests such as caterpillar, beetles, ants, grasshoppers & butterfly larva destroyed them. The veggies make the ground condition become so conducive for the creatures to live. At that time I tried to avoid any pesticide as I try to produce organic veggies, but it didn’t work, I still need to do some form of pest control.