It was a week of hands-on training and continuing farm development.
When the farm started a year ago, the Orang Asli had no farming nor team work experience. It was a steep learning curve from Day 1. To empower them towards being professional farmers, a series of workshops are planned to plug in their knowledge gaps.
The first in this series was a very interactive session led by Errol, our organic consultant, to help the farmers understand disease carriers, causes, prevention and cures, and the use of Effective Microbes (EM) on the farm. The OA were good students, both inside and outside the classroom!
The farm is moving one step closer to yielding regular varied crops and leafy vegetables:
- the two units of greenhouse built by Gamuda are almost operational – greenhouse vegetables like lettuce, arugula and others have been seeded,
- pumpkins, snow peas, bitter gourds are growing well in the nursery, waiting to be transplanted.
- sweet corns, sweet potatoes, okra, brinjal and long beans are doing well too.
To round up the week, we had an exciting surprise – the appearance of our long awaited kale. The farmers proudly showed us three curly kale plants, three toscana kale plants and a few cherry bell radish plants which survived the last season!
