Our little mountain area has a particular micro climate that is sometimes great , sometimes brutal.
The rainy season is now, but in places like Morelia it has only rained 3 or 4 times this month, but up here, our dismal corn crop and a majority of our chili manzana crop has been attacked by hail!
Mother Nature is to be respected and it makes me respect the farmer who daily works long hours to be able for us to buy almost anything we want to make or eat.
I grow a lot of my own stuff. And believe me, if I had to rely 100% on living off the land, I would probably have to devote 99% of my time to nurturing each and every plan and carefully picking each and every predator off of it.
A good example is one of my tomato plants which had a beautiful tomato cluster, with one, just one perfect orb, starting to turn red, so red that I could almost start tasting the succulent sugar sweetness with the cross of pepper and salt as I would be plopping a half sliced piece into my mouth..... Another day or two, it would be perfect.
But........
This morning as I came to inspect my future feast, I found that I had been beat to the taste test.
The dastardly culprit did not even finish the job, just a few bite marks , couple of incisor marks and my once perfect virgin orb was now debouched.
The culprit didn't even savor the whole fruit.
It probably wasn't ripe enough for him.
Well, I carefully picked the remain orb and washed it, removed the perforated portion, dashed some salt and pepper and savored every bit, bite by bite, imagining how the fully developed fruit would have tasted.....
So, either next year I will have to screen and net, or plant an excess or just get a dozen or two cats , letting them feed on the wild tomato bandits.
So between the corn damage, the meager chili harvest , I need to figure out what beside Duraznos (Peaches ) will survive the hilltop plantation. If anyone has some suggestions for me to follow I would love to investigate more.
I don't think there is a big demand for acres of weeds and pine needles............
Maybe I can cultivate truffles........
I doubt it!
2 comments:
For insect predators I use powdered tobacco leaves. It is cheap and very effective. You can buy a kilo for about 25 pesos. All you need to do is sprinkle it around your plants once in awhile. If you go to the mountains around Saltillo you will find that they grow a lot of fruit, especially apples. To prevent hail damage they put canopies made of black nylon mesh over the apple trees. Very effective against hail.
thanks for the advise Bob, now I need to hunt down some powdered tobacco leaves. And check out the nylon mesh!
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