Durian trees are generally excluded in residential lots or in public areas frequented by people.

Even in plantations, anyone should be wary of taking shelter under the canopy specially without a protective head cap on.

When the trees are mature and fruiting, naturally falling fruits can possibly cause harm or injury to man or any property including roofs and parked cars.

This is primarily because the fruit of durian can become both large and heavy, with a hard, spiny shell.

The impact of a drop can be severe.

The fruit naturally dehisces (separates) from the stem when ripe or otherwise drops even when still young due to various causes.

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Taking aside botanical issues, there are three types of sex in individual or solitary flowers:

(1) perfect, also called bisexual, hermaphrodite, and monoclinous flower;

(2) staminate or male flower;

and (3) pistillate, also called carpellate and female flower.

These are also referred to as modes of sexuality in individual flowers (Dellaporta and Calderon-Urrea 1993) or simply flower sex (Simpson 2010).

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I’d long been aware that the process of locating contour lines in sloping agricultural lands is basically the same as that when spots on posts at the same vertical elevation are marked using a carpenter’s level hose.

I in fact wrote in Bamboo Production and Propagation Methods which was published via this website in PDF format in 2010:

“Viewed from the side, an imaginary line that will traverse the points of each contour line will be more or less horizontal, as if a plastic hose filled with water was used by a carpenter in locating two points of the same elevation.”

But it took a brief reunion with Dr. Ariston Calvo at the University of Southern Mindanao in 2011 for me to be enlightened that indeed, a level hose can be used in place of A-Frame.

From then on I mentally stretched to formulate a procedure on how exactly would I use the carpenter’s level-hose.

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The African night crawler (ANC), known scientifically as Eudrilus eugeniae, is considered as the most efficient epigeic or composting earthworm in the tropics (Guerrerro 2009).

Even in 1981, Graff (cited by Guerrero et al. 1999) already reported that the ANC was used for vermicomposting in the tropics.

The ANC was introduced into the Philippines by Dr. Rafael D. Guerrero III in 1982 via West Germany, the original cocoons courtesy of Dr. Otto Graff (Guerrero et al. 1984).

The origin of this species is West Africa, but it is now widely distributed in both tropical and subtropical countries of the world (Graff 1981, cited by Guerrero et al. 1984).

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According to Edwards and Arancon (2006), vermicomposts are organic materials, broken down by interactions between earthworms and microorganisms to produce fully-stabilized organic soil amendments with low C:N ratios.

They also have a huge and diverse microbial and enzymatic activity, fine particulate structure, good moisture-holding capacity, and contain nutrients such as N, K, P, Ca and Mg in forms readily taken up by plants.

They contain both plant growth hormones and humic acids which can act as plant growth regulators.

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My inclusion of green coconut as an alternative option in the master plan for the farm was recently boosted.

BusinessWorld reported on April 26, 2019 that a company in the Philippines inked a business deal to supply $36.5 million worth of green coconuts to China.

This report further restrengthened author’s impression on young nuts which already peaked upon discovery of that exceptionally prolific coconut tree in the farm.

To understand more, this ought to be read as a continuance of a separate page.

A link is provided at the bottom.

Long before the report, I already started propagating and planting these medium-sized nuts at the farm.

I rationalized that medium-sized nuts would offer more options instead of relying heavily on copra as a product for marketing.

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Jean Sénébier (1742-1809). Jean Senebier was a Swiss pastor and botanist from Geneva.

He established that carbon dioxide (fixed air) was essential to photosynthesis.

He showed that plants absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen (dephlogisticated air) (Govindjee and Krogmann 2005).

His research on plants was encouraged by the discovery of Jan Ingenhousz in1780 that a green leaf did not produce “dephlogisticated air” in boiled distilled water.

This means that where water does not contain carbon dioxide, a submerged leaf does not produce oxygen.

However, it was Jean Senebier who later made the conclusion (Egerton 2008).

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There are crops which produce fruits and seeds mainly after undergoing cross-pollination, like corn, instead of self pollination.

Knowing the inherent characteristics of any particular plant as to the natural mechanisms briefly discussed below should prove valuable to any one who wishes to engage in crop improvement.

Indeed, basic procedures on plant breeding have been designed according to the natural modes of pollination of crops.

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Fiber crops are plants that are intentionally grown or otherwise managed for the production of fibers or fibrous materials with varied uses but not for dietary purposes.

Fibers are mainly  schlerenchyma cells that serve as component of plant skeleton and are often associated with vascular tissue.

These are usually long cells with pointed ends which typically occur in strands.

Any part of the plant such as the root, stems, leaves, fruits and seeds can have fibers but they differ in characteristics such as texture, length, color, strength, and chemical composition.

The abaca or Manila hemp, considered as the world’s premier fiber crop for making cords and ropes, has fibers which can reach 3 meters long.

These fibers have reportedly been used as composite materials in the manufacture of certain parts of cars (Obmerga 2011).

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