Cactus flower

First time seeing it bloom as such...

End of season

Now, we wait for the next round...

Red, hairy, juicy....

The pro's at the back, efficiently gathering the fruit in neat bunches while the amateurs at the front battling those pesky red ants...

Contact with cow poo on the way back. Worth it I guess...

Sweet Cactus

Sweet as in smell, not taste, though it might be as I have yet to taste them. The bud took a long time to appear but after a day or two it blooms with a heavenly smell that reminds me of expensive perfume. A threatening plant full of thorns producing such beauty and sweet fragrance, amazing.

Fertigation

Had the opportunity to accompany a friend visiting the site of a fertigation planting effort. This is a method where the farmer has almost total control on the elements of planting. From the environment - higher end projects has climate control (air-cond lahhh) - the planting material, water and nutrients. Very techie and star trek kinda stuff to me, test tubes, electronic switches and gizmos instead of the old farmers tools.

Simply put, water and nutrients are distributed via a network of pipes, the thin black tubes that goes into the plant.

Another type using auto-pot, automatic pot for plants. Imagine that.

The produce, here is a grade B or C rock melon. All about the same size and weight. I was told that grade A - for the Japanese market - would have more prominent veins on its outer shell.

Yellow melons ? Must taste great if chilled and served on a hot Sunday afternoon.

Plum tomatoes. I took one of these and it is one of the sweetest and tastiest. Even better tasting than those offered in KFC salads.

There are many other variety of plants but this one caught my eye. Giant ladies finger. The ones in this picture is among the smaller ones. There are those that are as big and long as my arm in the inner rows. Turns out that these are US imported varieties and cultivated for seedling. Ahhh, you need big long ones to produce good seeds....