Day 38: Community Quarantine

     MEET- Yesterday the school held a staff meeting online using Google meet.

    It is my first time to experience an online meeting complete with the ceremonies of a formal faculty assembly. The meeting was almost 4 hours long with various agendas presented and discussed.

    The problem was the ISPs signals were unstable that many participants, including me, were intermittently  disconnected. Our school head had a laugh when she found out that all the time she was talking, she was offline and had no audience. 

   Anyway, after all the discussion and schedules, in the end, we were all hostage to the Corona Virus' terms, everything depends on when the lockdown will be lifted.

     LEAF MINER- The string beans is under attack by leaf miners. It is the larvae of moths or beetles that eat through between the leaf tissues. 

    Fortunately, I see it early and is able to save the leaves. 

    How to control it? There are many ways to deal with it and the most common is using insecticide spray, homemade mixture of liquid soap and oil, or organic or toxic commercial pesticides. There are also preventive measures like frequent smoking to drive the insects away.

   What I do is simple and does not cost anything. I seek out the worms and kill them by pressing with my nails or pricking them with a pin. 

   But I have to check the leaves daily because the eggs and larvaes are almost invisible to the naked eye.  

     MULBERRY- I have four mulberry trees that came from cuttings. They are meant to be bonsais but since they have large leaves, I find it unsuitable for my preference. I like bonsai with small leaves, it's all about proportion. 

    Instead, I released them into the ground and allowed to grow wild though I keep them at about a meter and half high. I don't want them to grow tall and wide because they will soak up all the sunlight depriving the other plants of their main source of energy.

    I check up on them and see they are fruiting. Most of the times, I forget about the berries and they end up drying up, wasted . I notice that it is the young branches that produce fruits. So, I keep on trimming the branches to create ramifications to produce more fruits.