Nope, these fruits are not from the farm. Not at least for now. I’ve been putting up at my parents’ place during the MCO. In a COVID-19 era and especially in this troubling and dire times, having free access to food grown by ourselves and reducing our reliance on the mainstream economy is a golden advantage. As cash is king, conservation of it means only spending it on necessary items like food. But if you’re already growing your own food, then you don’t have to buy it.
My parent’s place is a regular urban location with a typical urban setting that comes with its own set of uniqueness. Right in front of the house is an empty land that serves as a buffer zone with the main road. There are a number of 15-20 year old dragon/chokanan mango trees (last season was off the charts!) along with some jack fruit trees. Old flavourful trees. They are now about 2 storeys high. Besides producing fruits for us, they provide great shade for parking and acts as a wind/noise breaker.
Nearby within 50-100m, behind a petrol station and under some power lines, there are tonnes of banana trees, and even more papaya, mango and jack fruit trees. All these trees are hardly fertilised for the past 10 years but yet produce fruits with the most amazing qualities and sweetness. Truly speechless to say the least. Credits go to my dad who singlehandedly tended to them for the past decades.
Now that the MCO is staring us in the face decades later, being able to harvest these crops every other week and enjoy them as healthy sustenance overwhelms me with a feeling like no other. It’s as though we have the last laugh. We can always say, “We earned this!” as a tribute to all the hardwork; which itself serves as a motivation for my farm.
I hope the current strange and uncertain times would urge everyone to really consider getting something growing from any idle land they have around them.
What you see here in this batch are just a small collection. Over the past two weeks, there were even more bananas. Assuming it’s a RM 100-worth of harvest a week; our rate of harvest would probably get us RM 150 a month (conservatively that is, we have at the moment a number of jackfruits ready to be harvested in the next few weeks). RM 150 may not be much but hey, that’s real chemical-free food. And since it’s “organic”, they could have been worth even much more.
It is our little actions over time that bear fruits years down the road.
