I was very happy to first my farm in this weekend again. Throughout this week, I have been working tirelessly to figure out the true status of my crops that I have grown , from maize, plantain, cocoyam as well as my tomatoes. I would say, so far so good since you wouldn't get everything perfectly going on well. You would of course make it in some way and fail as well in some way. That's why we always encourage farmers to adopt the habit of learning the skills of cultivating different types of crops, such that if one fails, you have the other ones which might be in the same situation like the first one.
One of the crucial thing to ensure in the farm is weeding or making sure that greater sanitation is done in the farm so that the weeds wouldn't compete with the crops grown. The second thing is to tackle pest and disease control. When it comes to certain crops like the cereals( maize, rice and millet) this is minimal since we pest and disease don't option destroy the crops on the field. The reason being that maize for instance is a tropical crop when you come to africa and it has acclimatized with the hot weather with the exception of severe drought which turn to cause wilting of crops at early stage. At normal weather conditions where it rains and shines at regular intervals, the maize crops grow very smoothly.
If not on commercial bases, most maize farmers don't apply fertilizer. The reason being that in Ghana for instance, most of our farmlands are very rich in nutrient supply to crops, especially Nitrogen supply. So, there is no need for the farmers to worry himself buying fertilizer to supplement the soil nutrients. Due to indiscriminate felling of trees for charcoal and timber production have caused most of the farmlands to devastated. Also, with the fast growing of population, most of farmlands are over utilized. Hence, there is high demands of food from the farm and this has compelled most farmers to use fertilizers.
With this, it took more years for most farmers to adopt the farming lifestyle of supplying fertilizers to the soil to replenish the infertile soil. The farmers through their own research found out that there is other bad side effects of over utilization of fertilizers on farmlands, like killing some micro organisms in the soil due to high efficacy or concentration of the chemical compound used to formulate fertilizers. Again, over utilization of fertilizer causes hardening of soil, especially the topsoils where most nutrients are embedded for the reach of crops root. The lands where fertilizers are used become very additive and wouldn't support the growth of crops as it were due to becoming used to fertilizer application.
For most part of my farm, the secrete is that I don't apply fertilizers throughout, yet I still get the required produce I wish to make. Like this season for instance, I have delayed the application of my fertilizer to the crops since I wanted to finish weeding first so the the weeds don't up take all the nutrients from the fertilizer after application.
Like I said, it depends on the types of crops that will tell whether pump in more fertilizers, pesticides or recommended chemicals to prevent pest and diseases. When it comes to tomatoes farm, this can't be optional, since tomatoes are too prone to pests and disease attacks. Fertilizer application can't be ignored, since they are heavy feeders of nutrients like Nitrogen from the soil. They also need to grow vegetatively in order to bear more flowers for fruiting. But, this shouldn't be over usage as it can cause the tomatoes not to flower. For most of vegetables crops that's their nature, they are weak and with little stress of weather conditions like too much sun or humidity they can be exposed and die off.
By this season, I ensured to provide adequate or extra support of my tomatoes plants. The fruiting are abundance and weighing the tomatoes plants. I had to quickly provide sticks to erect the tomatoes up in order to prevent the fruits from touching the soil. The effects of letting the tomatoes fruits touching the soil is that they can easily rot or eaten by some animals.
The brownish of the tomatoes leaves you observe here are due to the excessive rainfall which nearly spoil the tomatoes on the field. I'm lucky to have the rain breaking for some couple of days now. Some of the fruits as you can see here have began ripening. I'm waiting for my first harvest in this October 2023.
That is why I said getting different crops at different places really help to cut down the cost crop failure.