New Strategy From An Amateur

When I was at Vanessa's Backyard last month, I also went over to our planting site at Kuala Melaka to inspect my seedlings. I was shocked to see what these people had done to this site. 

Not only this mysterious group planted the seedlings with the bamboo sticks on Vanessa's backyard, they also planted on Kuala Teriang site. I noticed that these seedlings with the bamboo sticks were planted very far out towards the sea. From our experience, most of the young trees planted by the Digi Program were washed away because they were too close to the sea. Maybe this technique with the bamboo sticks may work, who knows. Well, we shall see. 

I looked at our neighbour's side across the estuary and this group also did the planting behind the pakcik's house. See picture below.  

Scanning the entire area, it looked like thousands of seedlings had been planted. According to Vanessa, this may be a government funded project. I believe her. Otherwise, who would spend that amount of time and money to do such a substantial planting. My only concern is will these people return to inspect and conduct maintenance work on these young trees. According to Vanessa, the previous seedlings were planted and no one return to maintain. 

At that time, I was still puzzled about the purpose of the bamboo sticks. My guess was that the bamboo sticks may provide some sort of barricades against any debris that may come crashing on it for example drift wood, logs and coconuts washed up to the shore by strong surfs. These are the culprits that knocked off the seedlings.

I looked at my seedlings that were planted on April 27th 2010 and they seemed to be in a pathetic condition.

Can you spot those drooping seedlings?

I began to wonder why my newly planted seedlings were not doing so well. Of course! These babes were in luxurious comfortable condition sitting in the container of fresh water for twenty four hours. And all of the sudden, this silly homosapien (which is me) took these babes away from the comfort zone  and put them in an extreme harsh condition. Those poor roots suffered from shock! Especially when Langkawi was in the prolonged hot dry season and the high tide did not really help.


I now developed a new strategy. DO NOT KEEP THEM FOR TOO LONG IN THE FRESH WATER. I shall limit the growth of the roots for only a few millimeters or a maximum of one centimeter. And will not allow the leaves to sprout. 

These lengths were way too much

And then plant them behind the taller trees and ensure that they have some protection. A lot of seedlings sacrificed to learn something new for an amateur like me. Sorry propagules...