THE RUST VIRUS. I see the Australian Scientists and farmers complaining about the rust virus destroying wheat. Let me tell of my own experience how I overcame the rust virus and the observations what causes it. Since we bought the block of land next door to build on, I designated an area of land to be a perpetual vegetable garden. People kept telling me to give it up because nothing can grow on the land except grass. I planted bananas and papaws all over the place and made success. I don’t like using chemical fertilizers because they poison the soil so I do organic gardening. I couldn’t dig the soil because it’s full of gravel, so I decided to do above ground planting. I made rows using old banana trees propped up with rocks and dumped in all the ashes from the kitchen, all the wild grass I cut down and the huge volume of garden waste. I also put in all the waste paper and cardboard and filled it with soil but although vegetables came up they all failed. I did the same thing the following year but it failed again. That was because of all the rock in the ground and the water runs straight down. I had a small crop of a turnip called Cassava, may be only one kilogram back in February. Rust virus struck November last year, it became evident in the fruit. Bananas developed woodiness, we had a pig so I fed them to the pig. Papaws were green, they rotted on the trees while inside they developed woodiness also. I harvested them by the sack, chopped them up into chips and cooked them up to feed as slops to the pig. One banana tree developed a fungus right around it from the ground up, I chopped it out because it dried up. I decided to try digging the garden with a spade and compost the soil by using ashes and slashing up the banana trees into every row. I dug a row with the spade and filled it with slashed banana trees, all I was doing was returning some of the goodness back to the soil. The pig produces lot of waste, I buried the manure in the garden also. Rust was evident because the leaves of the bananas dried up and the papaws too. I did a lot of burning and composting, no amount of water helped either, I chopped out three papaw trees, two stopped producing, the third one dried up and cracked on ground level, rust was evident inside the tree. Even the Cassava turnips were drying up from rust. I dug and composted the soil from end to end, I had to harvest the Cassava to cook slops for the pig because there were no papaws left on the trees. There was a large crop of hot chili for the first time since everything failed before, now after the third try I am finally having pumpkins because the rust was bred out by the looks of it. All the papaw trees are heavily laden with fruit again and at this time I’m half finished digging and composting the soil second time this year. The pig was slaughtered and eaten, we got about hundred kilograms of meat out of it, all the old chili plants were used for compost and lot of old pig meal and other vegetable and fruit waste. The soil used to be all white, sandy and stony, it has changed color from white to grey to brown and in some areas black but I am still digging lot of stones out of it. My observations of the cause of the rust virus are, 1, too much rock in the soil, 2, the salinity caused in the past by people using artificial fertilizers, 3, people getting the goodness from the soil and not putting anything back, 4, too much water, 5, not enough water, 6, people chopping down all the trees for firewood and not planting new ones to take their places. My solution to cure the soil is to use organics for vegetable growing and to dig compost in around all the fruit trees and non fruit trees that come up from time to time from the ashes like the Golden Phoenix,
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 06:17:33 +0000