Farmland Tales - Planting Fruit Trees

Farmland Tales - Planting Fruit Trees - Oct Week 4

Passion Fruit, Mango And Citrus Plantation 

So what's happening this week at our tiny farm with big dreams? 

Today is planting day again if I had a wand I would have converted our piece of the farm into a food forest in a woosh. I really want to get the garden up and green but well things are going to be slow. So we made one more trip to the nursery and got our selves some sweet lemon plants, Kafir lime, Mango, orange, two more passion fruit plants, and Betel nut leaf creeper. And of course, we have Bogey, our Shih Tzu, out here again with us.

Purple Passion Fruit 
In India, Passion Fruit is grown in many states. The two main variants of passion fruit in India are the purple passion fruit and the yellow passion fruit. Kerela has been lately leading in the cultivation of passion fruits in India.

I will come back in a couple of weeks to get my structure ready for the Passion fruit plants. One needs to have a spacing of at least a foot between two plants while planting these beauties, as they can grow up to about 8 feet. Since the plants can last up to 4 years - if not more - they need a good structure or trellis for them to grow. The first fruit-bearing generally happens in 6-8 months and the first year is generally not so great in terms of numbers of fruits but from the second year on each plant should be bearing about 200 or more fruits per vine.

For the lemon, mango, lemon and orange plants we dug holes about two feet into the soil at a gap of about 15 feet, added in some organic compost and placed the plants and filled the holes with dirt.

We spent a few hours planting and painting the walls and finally exhausted camped out for some beer.

Planting Kaffir Lime 

The sun can get really hot and exhausting by around 11 am so we try to plan our work early in the morning before its gets too hot. Ofcourse then its picnic and camping time before packup.
And you can guess who had worked the most ....!!!