Is your summer long enough for that? It needs very warm, like coastal SE Asia warm. Otherwise it doesn’t grow much, so as a leaf crop, it isn’t worth it. (I grew it years ago, and though I live in a place warm enough for durian, this never did very well.)

Water spinach as in Ipomoea aquatica?

Definitely not.

I don’t know who “owns” the land, but no humans live there. They haven’t planted the grass yet, but that seems most likely since that’s what people do around here. The grass would most likely be for cattle pasture, though some people also plant maize for pig/chicken feed for a year or two before converting to pasture.

I had planted various fruit trees in the gaps of a nearby secondary forest that had been logged over years ago, and they were really growing well. Mainly jackfruit, engkala, pulasan, and a few smaller native fruit trees and shrubs where there wasn’t as much space. Yesterday some people came and clear-cut that entire patch of forest (probably to plant grass), and there is now no sign that the fruit trees were ever there. The birds who used to perch in the trees over there seem very upset. Fortunately whoever cut down the forest hasn’t been able to burn it yet due to all the rain, but it’s only a matter of time.

I harvested 5 big jackfruits yesterday though, and I also recently received seeds of a strange funky fruit from a friend in the Amazon. We have no idea what it is, and Jim West can’t tell from the photos that my friend sent to him either. There was a delay in getting the seeds here, but I stuck them in some soil two days ago, and they are already starting to sprout, so they seem like survivors!

If anyone knows what this is, please don’t hesitate to comment.

Any tropical rainforest country where even if the laws are on the books, it would take all of their resources to enforce them. In America, Colombia and Ecuador seem like top options. In Africa, Cameroon and Gabon. In Asia, Borneo (Malaysia/Indonesia) or Papua New Guinea.

I would have thought the same thing years ago when I was reading the humanure handbook. I used to only use fully rotted compost in the holes for the plants, and that usually wasn’t available in anywhere near sufficient quantity (as I was planting hundreds of trees back then), so I’d need to go into the forest and scrape up the 1cm layer of topsoil and carry it back in buckets (usually uphill) to mix in when back-filling the holes. It’s a wonder that I could sustain that as long as I did. Meanwhile I’d empty the toilet bucket into a ~1m^3 pile with metal mesh around it to keep it upright while allowing for aeration and a sheet of metal or hard plastic roofing over the top to keep the rain out, and I’d wait patiently for it to break down, only to have the neighbours’ chickens or some other animal get into it and scatter it everywhere, and I’d need to start the pile again. Eventually I discovered that if the hole didn’t hold water after a rain, and if there was sufficient dry organic material mixed in, composting in place worked quite well without it going anaerobic. Keeping it covered in the ground meant no chickens, no smell, no maintenance. As I get older, I crave simplicity more and more, so this method just makes sense.

I’ve since travelled around a bit, and it turns out that quite a few people also compost in-ground after discovering, as I did, that trying to compost the “proper” way didn’t work very well in this climate. Some people even sheet-mulch with the contents of their toilet bucket, but I prefer not to do that in order to avoid any potential messes. (I have chicken trauma.) The only people I’ve met who continued to maintain aboveground compost piles long term (with underwhelming results) were those who had a fear of “germs” and ate cookery and took vitamin B12 supplements.

The one advantage of maintaining proper compost bins was being able to harvest tomatoes out of them. Now on the rare occasions that I eat tomatoes, the seeds get buried too deep to sprout.

Of course everything that I’ve written here only applies to the places I’ve lived in the wet tropics. Someone in a colder or drier climate would almost certainly need to do things differently.

I don’t exploit non-human animals, so it’s 100% humanure. When it’s raining or night time, I poop in a bucket, which we can call a composting toilet, but when I can, I prefer to poop directly in the hole. Less work that way. What’s the saying? “You say pathogen, I say vitamin B12”?

I dug a hole. For banana. But first I must poop in it multiple times.

Corymbia citriodora is supposed to work very well for repelling mosquitos. In my experience, it does nothing whatsoever, but I’ve also never seen a healthy tree, so your experience may be different.

Thanks! There’s still way too much grass for my taste, but it’s getting more lovely all the time. More durian would be nice.

Plenty of rain lately, so almost everything is growing a lot. Some of the jackfruits that I planted last year are still struggling, but most of them had some root damage during transplant, so I’m not surprised. Some of the new engkalas are really taking off now, despite everything in the world trying to kill them. I recently direct-seeded some Flemingia macrophylla as an alley crop in one area, but it hasn’t come up yet… I’m mainly doing maintenance this month: pruning some bigger trees, removing all of the little guavas that sprout up, and planting more pinto peanut. The grass is growing back in many areas, but I’ll keep chopping it down and uprooting it in front of the pinto peanut so that that can take over.

Edit: I smell a ripe jackfruit. I guess I’ll be eating that today.

Experiences like that are worth remembering. :)

Never heard of those dogwood fruits, but sounds like something that I would eat if I ever found it growing. Cool that you were able to educate those folks!

I’d be interested to know how they turn out!

All solid choices by the sound of it. I’ll need to read up on loquat some more.

How fortunate that you experienced an abundance of fruit at an early age!

And the tree doesn’t get too big and out of control?

Good to know. Different plants probably have different sensitivities to it also.

Ah. I didn’t want to assume anything about your level of knowledge/experience. Apple trees and most nut trees can take a long time regardless, so time will tell how they perform…