Sweet Yellow Passion Fruit Farming Makes Millionaires in Kenya

Sweet yellow passions fruits are perennial plants and the vine has a lifespan of about 5-7 years. Passion fruit grows best at an altitude of 1200-2000 meters above sea level, and at a soil PH of 5.5 to 7. During the growth period the farmer performs maintenance practices such as weeding, spraying with pesticides, and fungicides among others as he waits for harvest. One carefully tended sweet yellow passion fruit vine will grow to a length of over 20 meters, after the first 4-5 months of transplanting. Yields of 30 kg of fruit per vine/year can be achieved. Vigorous growth of passion is the key to achieving high yields. One acre can accommodate over 670 plants and each vine can yields 30 kg of fruit. One kilo goes for Ksh 50-80/= which means that a farmer can earn 670 x 30 x 50= Ksh. 1,005,000 per acre in one year. Secondly the plant grows a deep root system making it resistant to effects of low soil moisture. Moreover passion fruit juice is wonderful and in high demand  locally in Kenya and therefore the market is good.

Propagation of sweet yellow passion fruits:The vine is propagated through seed, cuttings and grafting. A seedling is ready for transplanting once the vine attains a height of 15-30 cm after 3-4 months. One full grown passion vine has the ability to produce up to 50 kg of fruits per year if it is supplied with the correct nutrients during the transplanting stage. Soil testing is recommended for specific soil nutrition recommendations. Otherwise the general recommendations are digging square holes of a width of 1 m and a depth of 1 meter and separating top soil from sub soil. The top soil is thoroughly mixed with 1- 2 wheelbarrows of well rotted manure, 125 grams a  compound fertilizer and afterwards filled back to the hole. After this; the seedling is transplanted into the pre-filled hole. This is a tedious process but it is the key to high yields and profit. When the vine is supplied with adequate manure, and fertilizer, passion fruit grows resistant to pests such as nematodes and other diseases. This strategy ensures that hard pans which limit room for roots expansion to facilitate deep root system development.

Husbandry practices of passion plant: The crop has a slow growth during the first 5 months of its life cycle therefore regular weeding is needed for vigorous growth. Injury to the plant during weeding should be avoided as bacteria and fungi will get entry to the plant through the wounds. Once the vine has been transplanted, 4 laterals grow from the main vine. Sometimes they may fail to grow, force them by pinching the shoot tip. The laterals are trellised on a 14 gauge galvanized wire stretched along the tops of posts whose diameter is 18 cm, 3 meter long and its base buried to a depth of 50-80 cm. Inter-row spacing of the vines should be maintained at 2 meters while intra row spacing should be 3 meters. This gives a plant population of about 670 per acre

Harvesting passion: Fruits drop to the ground when fully mature and are collected every second day. At this stage, they are shriveled which is the best condition for manufacturing. For the fresh market, the fruits are harvested when ripe just before shriveling. Growing sweet yellow passion plant/vine is a good economic opportunity in Kenya. 

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We offer the following products and services at affordable fees.

1. Agribusiness plans preparation
2. Agribusiness information e-manuals

AGRIBUSINESS PLANS PREPARATION

An Agribusiness Plan is the road-map to success in any farming business. An Agribusiness Plan preparation is therefore crucial for success of any farming business. This is the document which will support your agribusiness to grow, seek funding from financial institutions and/or donors, and monitor performance over a period of time for continuous improvement. Agribusiness plan is a management tool which will help you to avoid expensive mistakes in your farming business. FAILURE TO PLAN IS PLANNING TO FAIL. MAKE SURE YOU PREPARE AN AGRIBUSINESS PLAN BEFORE STARTING YOUR FARMING BUSINESS.The second important milestone is to get the right technical information.
 

AGRIBUSINESS INFORMATION E-MANUALS

a)       Watermelon farming e-manual 

b)       Dairy Farming e-manual

c)       Passion fruit farming e-manual

d)      Strawberry farming e-manual

g)      Tomatoes farming e-manual

h)      Capsicum farming e-manual

i)       Greenhouse farming e-manual

j)       Oyster mushroom Farming e-manual

k)      Tissue culture Bananas farming e-manual

l)       Upland arrowroot, Cassava, Sweet potatoes and yams e-manual

m)    Poultry Broilers, layers and improved indigenous/ Kienyeji e-manual

n)    Value addition and Agro-processing e-manual:The e-manual contains Manufacture of Fruit juices, yogurt, Fruit Jam, Small scale ice-cream making ,Tomato sauce processing, bread baking & cakes baking, cake decoration, vegetable solar drying,  Banana crisps and flour processing, cassava fermenting and flour processing, Soya milk and peanut butter processing.    

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Falling for Autumn Shiitake

Written by Mary Ellen

Flashback: Joe and Phoebe (and Merlin) enjoying the fall Shiitake harvest.

Joe tells us that the only time he was ever taken out of school was when the podpinki (buttons/stumpers/honey mushroom/Armellaria

mellea) were in season. He, his dad and grandfather would go cut banana boxes full of podpinki and jam them into the back of the family station wagon.  They’d arrive home as if fresh off a bank heist! His mom would be faced with hours of cleaning and canning mushrooms (isn’t it much more fun to be the forager than the kitchen drudge?).  This might be the reason that spring is her favorite time of year.

Here is an Armellaria species, just one of at least a dozen very similar species grouped together and labeled by mushroom hunters as "Honey Mushrooms," or as in Joe's example above, "podpinki." Do you have any tales about picking Armellaria? If so let us know in the comments section below.

Armellaria infrequently fruit on shiitake logs but ...even so, you should know what they are in case they make a showing! Identifiers: often clustered, growing in fall on wood, buff/brownish/yellow, often sticky caps with a bristling of short "hairs" on the top of the cap. Gills are attached, cream colored, and covered with a fibrous or webby "skirt" which becomes the ring on the stem as the mushroom grows. Spore print white.

There is no need to go foraging beyond your backyard if you are growing shiitake mushrooms. Yes, this is IT…Shiitake time! Shiitake have two general fruiting times when there is almost nothing you can do to stop the fruiting impulse…Fall, and (to a lesser degree), Spring. Planting a mix of different strains will help stretch out the season, but the combination of temperature change, rainfall and humidity after a long hot summer can mean grocery sacks full of mushrooms. 

Autumn: Flying geese, falling leaves, apple cider, wood fires...mushrooms!

 On our farm, we finished up a week or so ago with a nice natural flush of mushrooms from logs planted with Wide Range strains. Now the logs planted with Warm Weather strains, especially WW70, (a vigorous fall fruiter), are bumpy with mushrooms. We had our first fall frost two nights ago so we await with pleasure the prospect of harvesting the gorgeous Cold Weather shiitake. 



WW70 is a star early fall fruiter.

Good shiitake fruiting goes hand and hand with rain, so we are often faced with black brown, water logged caps. Mushrooms like this have a much shorter shelf life than properly harvested shiitake, really no more than a week. Plus, their dark shiny appearance scares customers if the mushrooms are taken to market. It is best to avoid this problem by watching for the earliest stages of fruiting, and covering the pinning (baby mushrooms) logs with fruiting blanket, frost blanket or clear plastic until the mushrooms are ready to harvest. Even if you can cover the wet but still developing mushrooms a few days before the cap starts to pull away from the stipe (stem), they should develop beautifully for a high quality product at picking time.  

Sometimes you just can’t get the logs covered in time though. Water saturated mushrooms are just fine to eat unless they have developed a dark brown cast to the gills (meaning rot). Saturated mushrooms can be dried, but be careful not to overload drying trays. Monitor heat and air flow as these easily get past their prime before they fully dry. Our favorite way to preserve is to slice and sauté until the extra water releases and evaporates. Season the slices to taste and freeze pints or puree and pack into ice cube trays for later when the fine memories of the fall harvest are equal to the taste of fresh-frozen shiitake. 

Pine squirrels are just as likely to snack on football Sundays as are local cheeseheads. Covering fruiting logs helps reduce obvious bite marks in prime specimines.

Just now, after years of hearing the tales of podpinik hunting, Joe tells me that the underlying reason for going mushroom hunting was the side trip to the White River in Waushara County, WI…for fishing. Figures!


Go to our recipes page to try Rachel's wonderful Shiitake and Cheese Tart.

Growing Mushrooms The Easy Way With Hydrogen Peroxide

What Is Hydrogen Peroxide and Why is it Used in Mushroom Cultivation?

According to Wikipedia, hydrogen peroxide is a clear and odorless liquid similar to water with a strong oxidizing capacity. Due to its oxidizing properties it is used as a bleach or cleaning agent. For consumers, it is usually available from pharmacies at 3 and 6wt% concentrations. Commercial grades from 70 to 98% are also available, but the latter require special care and dedicated storage. Hydrogen peroxide decomposes into water and oxygen while this process is thermodinamically dependent. This means that hydrogen peroxide decomposes slowly at low temperature while its decomposition is fast at high temperatures. Uses of  hydrogen peroxide include: domestic, therapeutic, explosive devices, as a rocket propellant, etc. I will list here some of its domestic uses:

• between 3%-8% it is used to bleach human hair
• used to whiten bones
• 6% is useful for disinfecting cuts and to stop bleeding in superficial cuts
• it can be used to clean tile and grout on floors
• at a concentration of 35% it is used as an antimicrobial agent
• etc.

From a therapeutic point of view, it is a common misconception that hydrogen peroxide is disinfectant or antiseptic for treating wounds. When applied to wounds can impede healing and destroy newly formed skin cells.

Hydrogen peroxide in a certain concentration proved to be efficient in killing living cells and it is currently used against contaminants found in the compost designed for mushroom cultivation. However, the proper concentration seems to be an essential factor for destroying simple organisms such as bacteria, yeasts, and other contaminants present in the substrate but without affecting the multicellular mushroom mycelium. Therefore this method has the advantage that allow you to pay less attention on overall contamination.

As far as I know, and underlined by Randall and others, commercial hydrogen peroxide is obtained chemically (but there are also natural ways to obtain hydrogen peroxide). Personally, I didn't used this method because I always considered some of the traditional techniques to cultivate mushrooms to be organic and therefore healthy. However, today I will get a bit deeper into this method and I will analyse this aspect too and I will discuss it bellow.

Randall R. Wayne: The inventor of
hydrogen peroxide method
of growing mushrooms

Randall R. Wayne is the inventor of the peroxide method of growing mushrooms and author of 'Growing mushrooms the easy way'. He holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the Univ. of California. He invented the peroxide method in 1993 and by now, his method is used in over 90 countries around the world. His method is design generally for edible mushrooms (Agaricus, Lentinus, Hericium, Pleurotus, etc).

Pros and Cons of the peroxide method
According to Randal hydrogen peroxide acts to some extent against all commonly-encountered airborne contaminants of mushroom culture and does not kill established mushroom mycelium or interfere with its growth and fruiting. This has the advantage to reduce the need of costly and elaborate facilities and equipment for environment contamination control so much needed in traditional mushroom cultivation. However, what peroxide does NOT DO is to eliminate all need for concern about sterile technique in isolating mushroom tissue fragments and does NOT kill established live multicellular organisms (such as green mold) beyond a certain size. It will kill isolated spores, yeast, and bacteria that find their way into your cultures. In addition, peroxide does NOT protect the mushroom mycelium itself from aerobic contaminants.

Health aspects of the peroxide method
As Randall stated, commercial peroxide is prepared chemically, it probably would not be considered compatible with organic certification standards; however, he considers the use of peroxide to be in the spirit of organic cultivation because when added to the substrate decomposes entirely into water and oxygen while there can be no trace of the added peroxide left in the mushroom crop. Besides, hydrogen peroxide itself is found naturally in all aerobic living organisms and in a variety of natural environments.

Materials and method
According to Randall's method for growing mushroom you will need the following:

1. a balance for weighting
2. kitchen plastic bags
3. a pot for boiling water
4. 5 gallon bucket
5. mushroom spawn
6. substrate material (pellet fuel, recycled pelletized paper fiber, etc -with few exceptions: see below)
7. 3% hydrogen peroxide
8. (supplements)

Note: There are no special safety required for handling 3% hydrogen peroxide
Peroxide will provide little or no benefits to substrates that still have a great deal of biological activity, such as compost or pasteurized straw, or fresh wood chips that have been treated with boiling water. The first material suitable with this method seems to be was pellet fuel for wood pellet stoves. Especially because this substrate comes previously heat-treated, so it will not cause peroxide to decompose. You need also to look for a brand of pellet that does not contain any additives. Another material used by Randall with peroxide  was recycled pelletized paper fiber. A material that does NOT work with peroxide is raw sawdust.

Randall's Directions

A. Preparing the substrate with peroxide

1. Take a 5 gallon bucket with a lid and clean it thoroughly. 
2. Next rinse the bucket and its lid with boiling water  
3. Place the bucket on a scale and scoop in about 8.0 pounds dry weight of pellets (hardwood) or 6.0-6.5 pounds (softwood pellets)
4. If you are using a solid denatured nitrogen source you may use it at this stage
5. Add your lime to the pellet fuel
6. Boil in a covered pot half the amount of water you want to add to the pellets. I usually boil 3.5 quarts (3.5 liters) for 9.0 lbs of oak fuel pellets. 
7. When the water has boiled for a minute, set the lid of the bucket on one side and pour the boiling water over the substrate. Seal the lid and mix the substrate.
8. Boil in a separate covered pot the other half of the water you want to add to the pellets. When the water has boiled for a minute set this pot aside to cool with its cover in place. 
9. Set the bucket of substrate aside to cool, with the lid in place. Cooling usual takes several hours. 
10. With a boiling water rinsed measuring cup, add about 1/2 cup of 3% peroxide solution to the pot of cooled, boiled water you've set aside.
11. Pour the peroxide mixture into the cooled bucket of substrate and mix thoroughly. This gives a final peroxide concentration of  about 0.03%, or a one to one hundred dilution.
12. Let the substrate finish cooling to room temperature. It is now ready to use. 

B. Adding supplements
If you are using sources of nitrogen supplements such as millet or rice bran, you will have to pressure cook them. While still hot, the sterilized supplement gets poured into the cooling pasteurized substrate. This is necessary to eliminate the the endogenous peroxide-decomposing enzymes before pasteurization. Other supplements that are considered natural and that do not need sterilization include: human urine and animal urine. Calculating how much supplement to add you'll find out by consulting Stamets's Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms.

C. Inoculating supplemented sawdust

1. Inoculate the pellet fuel sawdust by braking up the spawn briefly, then pouring it directly in the container with the substrate. I close the lid and mix everything together. 
2. I pour the mix into bags and then twist the mouth of the bag closed and seal it with a twist tie. 
3. Lastly I compress the sawdust by pressing it down on the bag, gently but firmly. 
4. The bag is ready for incubation. And from here on out I'm following standard mushroom growing procedures.

If you are interested in the process of spawn making i prepared two packages showing the detailed process of obtaining quality spawn with low investment.

Conclusion

Taking a closer look to the inventors overall image we know that he is a scientist in Biochemistry, a field that is particularly relevant to the topic treated here. I personally agree that the word of a scientist weights more than the word of those without any connection to science. With that said, Randall's peroxide method of growing mushrooms looks good according to my point of view. It has the advantage that significantly reduces potential contamination of substrate, while adding hydrogen peroxide to it decomposes into water and oxygen, that seems to be environmental and human health friendly. However, I'm not 100% sure that a commercial product such as hydrogen peroxide derived from chemicals may not cause any harm to human health. Therefore I still encourage growers to follow traditional mushroom growing methods.

Your Turn

What is your opinion related to growing mushrooms with hydrogen peroxide? Did you used this method? What about its efficiency? Please leave a comment and let us know about your experience. If you like this article please give it a 'Like'.

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A Successful Story of Blue Oyster and Shiitake Mushrooms Cultivation

This is a guest post by Devon Olsen, an active member of forums (permies.com and shroomotopia.net) on permaculture and fungi cultivation. This is the story of his first attempts in cultivating Blue Oyster and Shiitake mushrooms. His story is interesting and was posted here with the intention to help some people out there in their first trials of cultivating such types of mushrooms.

I guess mushrooms have always been kinda cool, but ive never really felt fascinated about them per se, but about a year ago i found a thread on permies.com about growing Oyster Mushrooms on an old phone book i think it was. Seeing those Oyster pins fascinated me, so i decided at that point to look into growing some of my own. Research ensued of course, as it always does for me, hours on the internet looking into ways to grow mushrooms, different kinds of mushrooms, recipes, health benefits etc. and I'm still learning, slowly retaining a little bit here and there. After the research began, but FAR before it was over (still learning lol) I received a response from someone on where to learn more about mushrooms and began an account at shroomotopia.net, a forum I recommend as the owner is more religious than one might expect and "shroomers" would be the ones to ask about any sorta mushroom growing, after all, Paul Stamets was once a shroomer, and he is now the worlds leading expert on mushrooms.

Blue Oyster Mushrooms: spawn, pinheads and fruitbodies. Photos: Devon Olsen

I have always found forums to be a goldmine for information, so i joined and upon joining and beginning to ask questions one nice member over there (redcap66) hooked me up with a free order of spores, i got 10cc of Blue Oyster spores and a slice of Shitake agar, as well as another spore syringe i plan to use for trading at some point. after they arrived i pulled out Grandma's pressure cooker and sanitized 6 quart jars of wheat/poplar plug mix. the wheat i found in the basement food storage and the plugs i made by buying poplar dowels at lowes and cutting to approximate but uneven sizes [i have since decided this was a BIG mistake because The Spore Depot sells a 1lb package of oak plugs in their supplies section for only $0.90!! I had spent 3 dollars(from memory), probably more and over an hour of time cutting up the plugs from lowes] and then i used a screw that i had soaked in alcohol and a small housewives hammer to puncture two holes in the top of the jar lids(approx 3 screws around each) and stuffed one with poly(for pillow stuffing) and the other was covered with some caulking (another mistake, use 100% silicone as recommended, it doesn't leave gaping hole upon injection).

For the two Blue Oyster jars i did i simply injected about 3cc's of spores into the injection port, for the shiitake i opened up two jar lids and used sanitized pliers to reach into the small plastic baggie that the agar came in and grabbed a pinch, then knocking the pinch off into the jar for each jar i first sanitized my work area by wiping it down with a napkin soaked in rubbing alcohol, the table, all tools, the jars and the jar lids twice for the agar i sanitized the pliers via alcohol and the syringe i sanitized via a candle flame until it turned red hot, then i let it cool completely with the tip suspended in air before inoculation i did all of this in a cool basement room with carpet but no drafts or fans blowing and the only one window closed i then labeled the jars and placed them in a cardboard box in the closet, a closet that never gets any substantial amount of light leaving the box open i covered the jars with two sweatshirts that i don't wear and a heavy winter coat as this was early summer when the jars were entirely colonized (the Blue Oysters were far more aggressive and colonized much faster than the shiitake did). I opened them up after washing my hands and prepared my newspaper substrate i soaked the newspaper in a weak bleach water solution before wringing them out and laying them out on a sanitized tote lid for soaking i used a tin container that i think originally had a Sams club casserole or something i then scooped into the jars and sprinkled colonized grain between the layers of newspaper for the first two newspaper logs i did i used one jar on two "logs" and pretty much did a 1 layer of grain to one layer of newspaper ratio while doing this i collected the poplar plugs i had in the jars and sat them aside on the newspaper logs that came from the second round of Blue Oysters and the first of shiitake. I spread out spawn a bit more to see how many i could realistically get from one old "log" or one jar of spawn i got ten "logs" from 1/2 of an older "log" of Blue Oyster and 6 "logs" from one jar of shiitake spawn results from this vary a bit but i HIGHLY recommend that when working with anything less aggressive than oysters, you are VERY ANAL about being sanitary and going at a one to one ration on spawn to newspaper, and being very generous with the spawn as it appears that every one of my six shiitake bags got contams and even a couple of the blue oysters so far (however the blue oysters are known to be more aggressive than most contams and will eat them from what i understand).

When newspaper "logs" were completed then i put them in a plastic grocery bag, with the shiitake, one should certainly sanitize the bags, with the oysters, i sanatized most but not all, the bags did not have holes and if they did i doubled them up so there wasn't a direct hole to the substrate during colonization. i used the plugs, which again were poplar and were also a diameter of 3/8 inches after they had been colonized in the grain jars, to inoculate real logs for outdoor cultivation for the first jar of blue oyster i colonized one log, approx 5 inches in diameter, and oddly shaped, just thought it would provide more edge for fruiting and that it looked better sitting there than a plain ol' straight log would.

I drilled holes in a log with a 3/8 bit in an electric drill that plugged into the wall and then pounded the plugs into hte log with a framing hammer, i neglected to seal the holes and i also neglected to cold pasteurize the log by soaking for 24 hours prior, we will see how well this works. i dug this log into the ground about a foot or so and then covered the hole or what was left of it after back filling with straw and this is under the windbreak which is comprised of junipers, keeping it in shade year round, we get average of 14in precip here every year so that's preferable for one jar i made newspaper logs with the shiitake but the other shiitake and other oyster were both emptied outside in a bin filled iwth straw and cow manure that was soaked in well water for 24 hours, the plugs for the blue oyster were put on the ground in a pile while i emptied the grain and the shitake were put on an old window screen while i emptied the grain, both of these plugs contaminated so i buried them in a few locations around the yard under wood hcips and straw mulches, hopefully some of them may come up given the right opportunity for fruiting indoors.

I started the two newspaper "logs" on a windowsill in the same room they were noticed up in, the window had a plastic sheet over it from when the room was built (last year) and i think this helped to maintain about the right humidity for the mushrooms on top of them still being in the bags the newspapers were kept in, poking holes for pins that popped up. i had a small spray bottle next to them and still do to spritz them when necessary during fruiting of the first flush i switched rooms, into another room and sat the bags directly on a dresser top that had a smooth finish on it, this gave me problems and the mushrooms aborted before they were ready to harvest. i picked the aborted mushrooms off by grabbing low and just twisting them off the substrate and i am now on the second flush. This time i have a different set up going i got a tote and a plastic trash bag and put the bags in the tote with the plastic bag covering the top (this was before picking to try and save the mushrooms) to allow light in but keep humidity up problems with this set up is that the humidity was too high and the mushrooms got a funky smell, also it would be too humid but the cakes were still too dry so my solution was to poke holes in the plastic bag, just a few that are finger width and most a little bit smaller. I dint poke them too often nor very uniform then i pointed a fan at it running on low then i had to leave town for a couple of deaths in the family and left the tote there but i sprayed it down before leaving, and filled a mason jar about 1/4 of the way with water ( this had a bit of leftover spawn from when i originally nocced up jar, i just left those in there) and left i got back and the cakes were a little dry so i sprayed them down and they appear to be growing back fortunately enough, now they are sitting there and beginning to form pins again, which means i am on my way to a second flush, hopefully this one is more successful. i occasionally update progress pics on shroomotopia, if you can find my thread, or on permies.

Learn more about Oyster mushroom cultivation reading How To Grow Oyster Mushrooms on Logs or the simple plastic bag cultivation of oyster mushrooms by checking my post How To Transform Paper Into Food there you'll find links to a more detailed cultivation method of oyster mushrooms.

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