I have been busy lately with my homesteading project (only small project actually). I believe that homesteading is one of the ways to keep us with fully pure organic food in our life. It is not only food sustainability but also a freedom of our food. As I would like to write tonight is about my own homesteading or farming things. We can easily manage to grow our own organic vegetables. I heard the rumor that many of seed factory do genetic modification (even for good purpose) for the seed before it sells to the market, I prefer self-preparing seeds to fabricated seeds. Departing from farmer family for generation, I knew a few traditional way of growing organic vegetable. Here are kinds of what I am growing on my ground
I have grown a few kinds of vegetable on my back yard since 3 weeks ago, some of them grow very fast and some don’t. The fastest growing vegetable is long bean (Vigna cylindrica), it has been 3 weeks now and I have put pole for it tendrils to climb.
Long Bean
First step is seeds selection: I took the seeds from dried long bean trees and dried it again under direct sun, after it completely dry. I kept it in sealed container without taking outer skin of long bean. The traditional way wasn’t like that. The real traditional way of keeping the seed is by hanging it over the traditional furnace which also use for cooking, it will keep bugs away until the seed is ready to be used for another planting season.
To plant long bean will not take special treatment of soil, it only needs a small hole on the ground. Put the seeds (2 or 3 seeds) into small digging hole on the ground and watering it regularly. I use organic (compos) fertilizer to stimulate the growing of my long bean. And it is how it looks like:
It is 5 days old long bean
In the sort time my family will have our own long been. Long bean can be eaten either fresh or cooked. I prefer to cook it and mix with some other staff like spinach or cassava leaves in coconut milk plus some other herbs and spicy stuff. We normally eat that with rice (Acehnese call it "Kuah Leumak")
Chili Pepper (Red Chili Pepper)
I also plant some of red chili pepper. I used plastic bag to plant this kind of chili in order to control it from wild weeds, and to be easy to move where necessary. I use the seeds from last season as well and re-grow it again. Last time I got plenty of red chili. I did make some money out of it, and hopefully I make same thing as I expect within the next 3 months. It also easy to pant red chili as you can put the seeds (2 or 3 seeds) directly on the ground or in plastic bag. The other way to do it is prepare a separate nursery place with really well cultivated soil, and then sowing the seeds of chili on it. The young sprouts will be moves to the dike after 3 weeks. But I am plating it directly into plastic bag as it is shown on the pics below:
Beside those tiny sprouts, I also have some other young sprouts given by my neighbor 3 days ago, and I planted it directly to the ground as it shows below. I cut the shoots to stimulate branches to grow. that is also our traditional way of growing chili.
The other kind of chili we normally use for daily cook is Cayenne pepper, I have a few cayenne pepper. Cayenne pepper is very easy to grow. I use this kind of nursery dike to sow the seeds and when it grow tall enough, it can be moved to the ground. The nursery dike looks like this and the size is 1 x 2 miters. Normally I use the nursery dike for sowing seeds of spinach. We will discuss in the other post about spinach and water spinach.
And the last pic is cayenne pepper
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I hope it is useful for you, and it doesn't waste your time to read my post, I really appreciate your comments. Please feel free to ask any question or give me more advice because I am not a professional, but it is what I have been doing for decades.
Don't forget to be happy, and keep sharing good things to others. God Bless You All
Best Regards