Caranx Thailand farmlife

Hello!

I should have started this glog some weeks ago but i have been pretty busy so it got delayed a bit!

Some background: I started my first grow and pepper glog last year. At that time I lived in a urban area on a island and didn't have much growspace and it turned out the neighbourhood was heavily infested by broadmites and many other pests. Once they was killed off the would return 1-2 months later and in the end I gave up the glog and cut down all peppers except two, a Aji Limo and a mystery pepper.

Fast-forward to 2019 and i got married and 4 months ago i moved with my wife to her hometown on the countryside.

I now have access to a 2 hectar farm where were we just started building a house.

The plan: 3-4 10*1.2 meter raised beds and two rows of in ground plants, plants will be planted out in 2 months and it is not enough time to properly amend our Claysoil so will mainly use raised beds for a year or so and the two rows in ground will be experiment to see how big diffrence the 2 months amendment will make.

List of varietys;

Stavros
Greek pepperoncini
Jalapeno
Jalapeno concho
Numex vaquero
MOA Red​ bonnet
TFM Scotch bonnet
Bahamian goat
Habanero hot lemon
Brainstrain yellow
Carolina reaper
Lemon drop
SR strain
Trinidad Hornet f5
Trinidad scorpion long SR
Scorpion moruga red
Limon
Brown bhutla SLP
Jay's red ghost scorpion
Aji Limon
Caramel bhut jolokia
7 pot Chaguanas Red 
JAFSH red
Billyboy douglah
Dorset naga orange
Borg 9 bleeder
Diomar

I just finished weeding out the spot this week so will start marking out where the raised beds will be and also till and mix in some stuff for the row of in the ground plants.

Alot of the farm hasn't been deweeded for 4-5 months so it's like a jungle right now with weeds reaching 2+ meters. Really hard work cutting it down even with a heavy duty cutter.

How it looked when i was just getting started

After, should be enough space for this year's grow

 

[Caranx]

Will transplant the first wave of seedlings tonight and next week they will move into our newly built seedling house which right now mostly have diffrent kind of salads and green onions in it.

We are gonna build 2 more grow houses for vegetables and the peppers I'm gonna be collecting seeds from.

 

[Caranx]

Here is my survivors from last year

The Aji Limo currently have around 100 pods on it and the mystery pepper just started flowering. The mystery one is either a habanero St Martin or MOA Red, Tfm bonnet or a Brainstrain.

The Aji limo

One of the clusters

These are 4 phenos on it

Mutant pod

 

[Caranx]

Was gonna post more photos but seem like they changed the policies on this forum compared to last year and i can't upload anymore photos unless I pay up. Too bad

 

[saiias]

Was gonna post more photos but seem like they changed the policies on this forum compared to last year and i can't upload anymore photos unless I pay up. Too bad

You can upload the photos to 3rd party image hosting site like imgur and link them here. There is no limit on that.

Sent from my SM-G973U1 using Tapatalk

 

[The_NorthEast_ChileMan]

You can upload the photos to 3rd party image hosting site like imgur and link them here. There is no limit on that.

Sent from my SM-G973U1 using Tapatalk

+1 on IMGUR....

 

[Caranx]

Thanks for the reminder guys. Don't know why I didn't think about that lol.

Here is the mystery pepper, i got so tired of fighting broadmites and stuff for 6 months so i chopped most plants down including this one and then left the pots standing. After about a month or so this one started producing new shots on the stem so i started taking care of it again and it ended up a very nice plant. It now got 4 buried mainstems.

Our kitchen plants that the landlord planted in our garden, they been trough 2 monsoons so they look like crap but they produce OK and we harvest them about every 5 weeks or so.

And here are the around 50 Thai varietys at the farm. They were planted just to fill out space together with Papaya trees and Thai eggplant. My wife's father built a reservoir 6 months ago, so they were planted in totally unamended clay from when the hole was dug. Around 10 of them are really struggling but the rest are producing good which was a suprise.

Here is a bonus of me opening a Durian together with our rat control

 

[The_NorthEast_ChileMan]

Was gonna post more photos but seem like they changed the policies on this forum compared to last year and i can't upload anymore photos unless I pay up. Too bad

 
This is addressed by Admins @ Picture Format Restrictions/Requirements?

 

[Caranx]

A small update
 
Around 30 seedlings now out of the propagation boxes and will be moved to the nursery this week.
Waiting for last 5 or so to popup in one of the boxes so i  can put down the last wave of seeds to germinate.
 

 
They get germinated in pure cococoir and then moved to a seedlingmix consisting of
75% cococoir
15%perlite
10% carbonized rice hulls
 
Also started working on the mix i will use for the inground patch, should be finished mixing it all up in a few days. 
30% cococoir
10% coco chips
30% black soil with some castings in it
20% ricehulls
10% carbonized ricehulls
 
Sifting out the fiber from the coco, better to use it as mulch

 
First bag of black soil

 
some cocochips

 
The precious carbonized rice hulls

 
Water it and mix it some more and i have some good stuff

 
 
 
Cant say i´m looking forward to do the mix for the raised beds by hand, hard work and will take a few weeks lol!
 
 
 
 
How the nursery currently looks on the inside

 
Finally the actual building part of our house has started and we got a blessing done a few days ago

 
Some random pics from the farm
 
Snakefruit, taste the same as aprikots

Some of the papapayas

Some banana

Picking some Pak Liang/Gnetum Gnemon, really good in scramble eggs or omelettes

A big part of the farm looks like jungle right now, but it´s organised chaos 

Cool looking Dragonfly

 
 
 
 

 

[kentishman]

Thanks for posting all the pics, especially the local fruit.

 

[PaulG]

Lots of hard work evident on your part, Caranx!
Very impressive.

Good luck going forward!

 

[Caranx]

Lots of hard work evident on your part, Caranx!
Very impressive.

Good luck going forward!

Luckily I get help with most of the stuff!
My wife's family are really hard workers and very good people.
They had this and another farm for 20 years, when me and the wife married and moved here they said i was now part of the family and these farm are now also mine.

They are getting older so we will have to take over all the work sooner or later so i guess it's better to get used to the hard rewarding work now.

My mother and sister in law get up 5am every morning to collect the rubber/sap from the hundreds of para rubber trees seen in some of the photos. After that they need to work with all the veggies and fruits.

So the my 2 main missions the coming years is to search for unknown varietys for the locals that they find tasty and hotter, then part of the family(cousins e.tc)that are market vendors will sell these so the money goes to the family.

Second mission is the to create something better out of the Claysoil they have. The one where the rubber trees are is ok since all leafs and branches and years of cutdown weeds has amended it as time passed by. But the more open areas still becomes like hard concrete when it is dry.

 

[Caranx]

First post-move wave of Aji limo's started to ripen last night.
Sadly since yesterday i have picked around 10 immature pods because of pepper fly's or weevils.

The mystery plant have started to produce pods aswell, looks like it might be a bonnet?

The kitchen plant have been putting out alot of fruit the past week

Was supposed to till and amend the plot today but a storm came in yesterday so alot of hard rain and wind now. I hope it stops soon so the Claysoil can dry out a bit again so i can started amending it.

 

[b3rnd]

Awesome glog! Glad you decided to make one again. I love to see how people in completely different evironments and climates grow their peppers. I also love the other pics (not pepper-related I mean).

 

[Caranx]

I intended to hold off and wait to start picking pods until next week but snatched one that turned last night anyway.
I don't know, the flavour and heat was a bit off. About same level heat as a Thai pepper but in the chinense way. Will let the others sit a week and hopefully they will be better.

 

[Caranx]

Slept at the farm last night so i could start working early today, rain started pooring late morning as i just finished staking/marking out the raised bed spots. Had to hurry and help the mother and sister in law with collecting the rubber sap before it became too diluted. We got around 30-40 liter.

When collecting the rubber you basically go tree to tree emptying and scraping these kind of bowls. You can either sell it in liquid form or dry and press it into sheets and sell it for a bit higher price. The biggest buyers of this kind of rubber are tyre and condom manufactures

And here is some Thai chillies the mother in law picked this morning, around 1kg

 

[sirex]

Very cool. What kind of price does the rubber Garner?

 

[Caranx]

Very cool. What kind of price does the rubber Garner?

Too little right now. Corruption in higher places has pressed down the prices by 75% the past 5 years.

In this province it goes for 30-35 baht per kg. That is around 1 dollar. In some other provinces it sells for 18-25 baht so under a dollar for a kg.

 

[PaulG]

Really interesting, Caranx. Never seen rubber
production in action before! Does the sap flow
year 'round, or is it seasonal?
 
Good luck amending the soil for your garden plots.
What are you going to do by way of amending it?

 

[Caranx]

Really interesting, Caranx. Never seen rubber
production in action before! Does the sap flow
year 'round, or is it seasonal?
 
Good luck amending the soil for your garden plots.
What are you going to do by way of amending it?

It flows year around, but the trees do need to rest after being tapped for a long time so usually they don't tap all trees at once so they can swift between atleast two groups of trees.
Also they can't be tapped if it rains the night before.

I only have 2-3 months before the peppers will be planted and it's mostly just to see if it grows since most of them will be n raised beds. The ones goin in ground will also all be Anuums.

As soon as we have a longer break from the rain so the soil can dry out a bit I will till the spot and add the soil mix I've done and some bonemeal n chicken manure.

I have another unused area that i want to use in a year or so, that one i will be adding leaf compost and carbonized ricehulls to continuously.