Sweet Pea Trellis

I often use Sweet Peas or Sugar Snap Peas in my stir-fry cooking so I thought about growing my own in the garden instead of buying them in the market. How difficult could it be to raise my own Sweet Peas right? So I looked for whatever materials that I could salvage to use in making my trellis but I could not find anything suitable for my purpose in mind. Then I had this "B-R-I-G-H-T" idea of using an old clothes stand that we have in the house! It is actually the perfect size because it may only be 4 feet wide but it's also 5 feet tall. This is made of 1-inch metal pipe materials with two welded stands and a pipe that goes across the top which holds the stands together. We only use this stand to hang the wet  clothes on hangers or for laundry during the rainy season anyway. So I thought I might as well put it to good use while it is still summer instead of it just laying around in the corner. All I had to do now is to find something that I could put across the width and the height of this structure so the Sweet Peas will have something to climb onto as they grow. Then I thought about the excess 1 x 1 inch wire mesh material that was left over after we built the chicken run and that solved my problem. So, I measured the length and width of the structure and cut the wire mesh according to size and attached this to the stand and Ta-da!  I got a Sweet Pea trellis. That picture below with the square structure is the Sweet Pea trellis and on both sides of it are the tomato cages. Well I hope you enjoy the pictures as much as I enjoyed making the trellis.

Sweet Pea Trellis

Sweet Peas ready for harvest.

Sweet Peas taller than the trellis.

Planting Chayote or Sayote

The lowly Chayote or Sayote as it is commonly called here in the Philippines is nothing but lowly at all. In fact, it is a very versatile vegetable and it can be used in stir-fry recipes and soups. It can also be added to stewed or boiled chicken or meat dinner, it can be steamed and eaten with a dipping sauce of your own choice. It can also be made into pickles or candies if you know how. It keeps well even without refrigeration. I remember a time some years ago when many people in the lowlands were victims of calamities such as strong typhoons and flooding and they lost everything except for the clothes on their backs. The people of Baguio City ( that includes me of course) pooled our resources and sent plenty of sacks full of this Sayote fruits as our way of helping the victims in terms of food aide.  

We have a Sayote plant that was planted in the lower terrace near the rabbitry. The plant used to overrun the roof of the old pigsty before we converted it into the rabbitry. When we started to do the work on the rabbitry, we had to cut off the stem of the Sayote plants. Now, they are growing back again. There are still a few remaining trees that we did not cut when we got some to use as post for the chicken run. The Sayote plant uses these trees to climb onto and it is bearing some fruits now. We gather the tender shoots and its fruits for our own food consumption and we use the leaves and its vines to feed the chickens and the rabbits. Nothing is wasted with this plant. It is easy to grow sayote by using the matured ones and planting it directly on the ground and once it is already established, it will bear a lot of fruits. We apply rabbit manure directly on the plant as fertilizer. Rabbit manure is considered as cold fertilizer unlike chicken dung which has to be aged and composted before being used. This is why rabbit manure can be applied directly without burning the plants. This sayote plant thrives in a cool climate such as what we have here in Baguio City but it will have a difficult time surviving in warmer areas such as in Isabela. My sister-in-law tried planting it in Isabela but in spite of the care that they gave to the plants, they did not make it.

  

Planting Snap Green Beans

I sowed some snap green beans directly on the ground near the fence and I sowed some taro plants in the forefront. The beans will use the reed sticks that were stuck on the ground to climb onto once they start growing. This is to maximize the space in our small backyard garden because the beans will grow vertically along the fence. It takes some time for the taro plant to grow anyway, about 6 months before harvest. The taro plants will not be hampering the growth of the snap green beans even with their broad leaves because by then, the latter would be climbing the fence and the reed sticks as they grow faster than the taro plants. Besides, I will be transferring the taro plants in the new hill garden once they grow bigger. When it comes to watering, both of these plants likes a lot of water so they should do well being planted together.

The picture above is the back part of the garden. The ground in this area is about 3 feet lower from the garden level. Behind the flowers and the ferns is where I planted the snap green beans. The flowers and ferns are growing in between the stone retaining walls and the potted plants at the bottom are bromeliads.  

Planting Potatoes

Mary, my best friend who is also my neighbor has given me some potato planting materials and I planted them in one plot in our small garden about a month ago. She said that I have to bury the whole plant and cover all of it with soil and that it would take two weeks before the plants will emerge from the soil. But first, I have to prepare the plot and put some chicken manure in the holes and cover it thinly with soil then leave it there for two days before planting. However, I did not have any composted chicken manure so I did not put in any. Knowing that she is a farmer and she comes from a farming community, she knows what she is talking about so I followed the rest of her advise even if I did not use any chicken manure.

A picture of the potato plot above. The structure on the left side with a plastic cover is the outdoor aviary and further beyond is the chicken run with some of the chickens roosting on the branches.

In two weeks time, sure enough, the potato plants did come out just like she said they would. When my friend Mary came for a visit yesterday, she noticed that my potato plants were growing tall but my raised bed was not enough. She advised me to do some top dressing on the plants and to raise it to about 1-foot high so the potato plants will have enough room to grow and to put some fertilizer on the plants. Since I read on the Internet that rabbit manure can be applied directly on the plants as fertilizer without it burning the plants, so I took some aged rabbit manure from my compost bin and applied about 1 inch around the stems of the potatoes but not directly touching the plants. Then I covered these with 6 inches of top soil which I took from the vacant plot so the flies will not get into the manure. It rained this afternoon as soon as I finished working in the garden so I didn't have to do the watering myself. This is the rainy season here now in the Philippines and I just hope that my potatoes will survive the rains.

Spring Onions in a Plot

I use a lot of spring onions in my cooking specially when I am making comfort food or even if the recipe does not call for it, I still use it because we like it. The spring onion sometimes takes the place of the onion bulb in my cooking. If I happen to ran out of onion bulbs, I substitute it with spring onions and it still tastes good. We all like to eat comfort food especially when it is raining. This is the rainy season here now so I cook a lot of hot soups and I add spring onions in my recipes. I also use spring onions when I am making arroz caldo which is one of our favorite comfort food. I like the idea of picking up the fresh spring onions straight from the garden whenever I needed some of it in my cooking.  

My DH is usually the one who does the gardening in our backyard but since he is busy right now, so I took over the garden and planted some spring onions in the smallest plot. My sister bought me a kilo of spring onions in the market as my planting material. We first cut off the upper green leaves and used that for cooking. What was left was only 2 inches of the white stalks from the roots. This is what I used as planting material. I planted them just last week and now we could see some green leaves coming out of the white stems. I used to have some spring onions planted in one corner of the garden but I used them all up which is why I wanted to plant some more so I don't run out of it.

The plot of spring onions and on the right side is the outdoor aviary.

This is the smallest plot in the backyard garden planted with spring onions.

Planting Taro in Dry Land

Well, it is really the rainy season now here in the Philippines but we've been having some sunny days lately for the past week or so and this encouraged me to do some planting in our small backyard garden. My sister bought some taro plants in the market. These are the big one that are ready for cooking and they do not sell any smaller plants that are ready for planting. What we do to get our planting material is to cut off the leaves and the stalks and leave only about 3 inches of the stalk at the base. Then from the 3 inches of stalk that is attached to the tuber, we go down 2 inches then cut off the bottom end. What is now left is what will be used for planting material, a 3 inches of stalk with 2 inches of tuber attached. The rest of the plant goes into the pot for cooking.

We do not sow the planting materials right away. We first dry them out in the sun for at least two days to make the cut portion dry so the worms will not eat them. After two days of drying under the sun, I sowed the plant materials in a prepared plot which is a mixture of soil and composted rice hull that I removed from the chicken coop. Many people here in the Philippines plant Taro in wet land but since I do not have that, so I will have to make do with what I have and plant them in dry land. Having the rice hull mixed in with the soil will make the rain water to drain faster but I figured that with the rainy days being here, it should help the plant to take root faster. We planted some beans and Pechay in this same plot the last time but now I am practicing a crop rotation so I am sowing taro plants in this bed this time.

Converting a Rock Garden into a Vegetable Garden.

This area used to be a small rock garden in the backyard. It was filled with  different kinds of ornamental plants and flowers that we have collected over the years. There were too many plants of different varieties that I could not even name them all. So anyway, one day, my husband and I were talking about the idea of having a small garden in the backyard. The more that we talked about it, the more that we liked the idea of raising our own organic vegetables. The problem is, we did not have the space to make a garden in the backyard but we had a small rock garden. So we talked about the possibility of converting our small rock garden into a vegetable garden. We both agreed that we could put all the flowers that we like into pots so we could move them around the property or wherever we wanted them to be and make use of the space for a vegetable garden.

Well, it's easier said than done.  It took us about two weeks just to clear out the area of small stones and gravel, it was hard work but it was worth it. Because of space constraints, we were able to make three small plots only. Well, three plots is actually better than nothing. We used stones of various shapes and sizes just to make a retaining wall along the sides of the garden plots to contain the soil in the raised beds.  Then my husband made a one-foot walkway in between the two rows of raised beds and he laid some flat stones over this walkway so it will not have to be muddy specially when it rains. We bought a roll of three feet tall 1 x 1 hole wire mesh material and used this as a fence to enclose the perimeter of the garden. Now that we have some native chickens in the backyard, I'm glad that we decided to put up this fence in the garden. This fence keeps the chickens out and deters them from messing with the vegetable garden. There is a runt among the chickens who is an escape artist and we always find her scratching near the garden fence.