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Hums Malayalam- Kerala |
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| Title |
Perfect orchids and chilli |
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| Details |
25220 Prevention of snail attack in orchid and other ornamental plants
Jolly George
Kottakupurathu, Pallorkavu
Thekkemala, Idukki, Kerala
Jolly George (40 years) has studied up to Class-XII. She is a home-maker and has three daughters. Jolly’s interests include household remedies for common diseases and farming problems. Jolly’s husband, a farmer, has always supported her in experiments to overcome difficulties in their farm life. Her family income is Rs. 8000 per month.
Snails eat and destroy the leaves, buds and flowers of ornamental plants especially Orchids and Anthurium. Jolly has acquired expertise in snail control from her mother and uses a combination of various ingredients to deal with them. After experimentation, she came up with a formulation using coir pith, charcoal and sand. She found that this combination is quite effective for controlling snails.
Materials such as 0.5kg coir pith, charcoal, 2kg sand are soaked in 2.5ml of hot boiled water for half an hour. After the mixture has cooled down and the excess water strained off it is used to fill the pot to be used for planting the Orchid or Anthurium. This will prevent the attack of snails and the plant will grow well and produce more flowers.
25221 Innovation for making chilli more spicy.
In former days, people in her village practiced rotating or shifting cultivation. It was the normal practice to cut down all plants, shrubs and trees to cultivate crops such as paddy, vegetables and the like. Glycosmis pentaphyalla (Panal) is one such widely available small shrub that is cut down but its properties are locally unknown. Her grandparents had once noticed that the chillies grown in the area formerly occupied by Glycosmis had a higher pungency. After observing the improvement in spiciness, they repeated the experiment and found the same positive results. Jolly acquired this practice from her grandparents and continues to practice it today too.
Although it is traditional knowledge, this particular application for chilli farming is not known by many farmers. Once the chilli plants are two weeks old, fresh green leaves with small twigs from the ‘Panal’ [Glycosmis pentalphylla (Retz.) DC] shrub are mulched at the base of the chilli plant. When the leaves are totally rotten or decomposed, mulching should be repeated with fresh leaves. The ‘Panal’ leaves being thick and strong require two months to decompose totally. This practice needs to be repeated twice or thrice. The application helps the chilli plant to develop a vigorous growth, yield and higher pungency. This is practiced mainly for ‘komban’ or ‘vattal’ variety of chilli. She has not yet conducted any comparative study with any other local variety of chilli. |
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| Volume No. |
Honey Bee 25(2) 17, 2014 |
