COOL SEASON MOVES TOWARDS THE HOT SEASON FOURTH WEEK OF FEBRUARY

There was great excitement at the beginning of the week when a large tractor and trailer came into Buddha Garden full of coconut fibre. We bought this from one of the local coconut fibre string factories so it was very loose with not too many long fibres in it. We haven't had any for a while - since before covid I think - but we found we needed some for the nursery mixture used in the nursery for growing microgreens and seedlings. If its mixed in the soil it absorbs a lot of water making the soil nicer for the roots of the plants. We are also going to put some onto the floor of the chicken house where it will soak up a lot of moisture and smells.

In the end we had a big pile that will last for quite a long time. It doesn't look like we are going to be able to get enough leaves to make compost in all the compost bins. So we used one of them for the coconut fibre. Given the lack of leaves (we can't get a tractor with people to come and deliver them) I think we are going to have to use the chickens to make compost more constantly. I have some ideas about how to do it.....

With the end of the cool season in sight and the need to plant as many lettuce seedlings as we could before it got to hot for them to grow, we started clearing this bed.

The next day we planted the whole bed using up most of the seedlings. We then harvested turmeric growing in the Seed Garden to clear the bed for the rest of the lettuce seedlings.

At the same time another team were planting more bassella spinach as the sooner we get it into the ground the sooner it will start growing to take advantage of some of the hotter days we are now having.

Here we are planting the very last of the lettuce seedlings....

......in the Seed garden. Although unfortunately we won't be able to grow these for seed. It is so hot that although they will make seed pods the seeds won't be of a very high quality and probably won't germinate very well.

We also started cutting some parasite plants from some of the orchard trees in Le Jardin. In this case it was a ramphael.

No one seems to know what this plant is called but it reminds me of mistletoe. In this tree there was only one parasite plant, but other trees had far more. If left to grow, they can soon take over a lot of the tree meaning the tree won't have too much energy for growing fruit.

In this picture you can see the lumpy bits that the parasite plant makes so it can hold onto the tree. From there it will spread to the rest of the tree. This particular plant also played host a large number of red ants crawling all over it.

This time of year is when the pineapples start growing and they are a brilliant and intense red colour as they do so. As they grow they gradually lose this colour and eventually turn a sort of yellow green.