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A long journey

Hi to you all.
It’s been a while since I last posted on here but always kept a keen eye on what’s been going on.
I thought that after a while of being away i would tell you about the problems of growing habaneros in Thailand.
I have been living here for a while and have always loves to grow chilies, Habaneros and the like. So i acquired some orange and white Habaneros from a friend in the UK
This is just the start of a long process which has taken about 3 years of work to try and get the plant to grow healthy and to produce an on-going crop.
This is just the basics of what I did, hope I don’t bore you too much, and if you do get to the end, thanks for reading
First of all there was a problem with the germination; about 1 in 10 seeds would sprout. This was soon overcome by using coir and the success rate soon reached 90% plus. After that you would think it would be all plain sailing, well that was not the case. After potting on the plant, for about 4-8 weeks seemed to be ok, they would grow as normal as any other plant. Then the problems started, Yellowish, green leafs and leaf curl, it seems there was something not right with the soil
The plants would continue to grow, flower and in some cases produce pods, but in general the plants were very unhealthy looking and would die as a result.
After a bit of research on the internet and talking to a local university lecturer i discovered a technique by Apnan, {Asian pacific natural agriculture network}, so i decided to implement the system they use to correct the problems with the soil, and to date this seems to be working. It would appear that Thai farmers, over the years have killed the soil with burning, and over ploughing,and they now have to use untold amounts of chemicals to get there crops to grow. So, the plan was to put back into soil the microorganisms it needed.
I found a place that sold E.M {EFFECTIVE MICROORGANISMS}, but to just dilute this with water was not enough.
{The good thing about EM is they double in population every hour, and create, over time a good soil base}
You needed to give them protein and carbohydrates to survive. The protein came from the water after rice had been clean and the carbohydrate from brown sugar.
I then had to get the quantities of all 3 right for this to work, too little of one or too much of another and it just wouldn’t work
I made about 1 litre, which I then let to rest for around 7 days, for everything to get working, and then diluted this by 500-1 and then applied this to the soil every week

Experimenting on several plants and the using information from Apnam and a little help from a friend, came up with the measurements I needed, and stuck to this formula, and to this date all seems to ok. Plants didn’t die, Crop yields went up , flat leafs and good colour meant I had, I hope, sorted out his problem.

The only other thing I had to do was make sure the plants were getting enough of the other vital components to be healthy, e.g. calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc etc. etc.
To do this I just used sea salt, bought at a local shop and diluted this down 200-1, you will be amazed at what sea water contains.

Seawater composition (by mass) (salinity = 35)ElementPercentElementPercentOxygen85.84Sulfur0.091Hydrogen10.82Calcium0.04Chloride1.94Potassium0.04Sodium1.08Bromine0.0067Magnesium0.1292Carbon0.0028​


I know this doesn’t look a lot but plants don’t need a lot.
I was buying fertilizers with all of these things and was probably overdosing them and not helping the cause
Just like us we need mercury in our bodies, but just the smallest amount is enough, too much and it fatal. It’s the same with plants, just enough of the right components and sea salt did the trick.
There are other factors to be taken into account when growing chilies over here, excessive heat and torrential rain, but this is just one of the few things that i had to overcome.
This is just a rough guide to what I did with the help from a good friend
Thanks for letting me share my experience
bye
 
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