SBS Orchard & Landscaping

By Chiu Sheng Bin

RESERVED...Tying an immatured durian to its branch so that it won't fall off the slope when it drops.

SBS land is shaded by a full stand of young, bearing durian trees, in all 281 trees, not to mention the petai, cempedak-nangka cross, langsat, and rambutan trees and even a handsome assam gelugor tree (see if you can find it).

This season (December 2000/January 2001), the durians and cempedak/nangka fruited prolifically. The durian trees are all clonal durians including D24 and Ang Hea. We are still identifying the various clones. To do that properly, we have to taste the fruits from all the trees, a job that none is complaining! We suspect that the cempedak trees are actually cempedak-nangka cross when we find the trees fruiting non-seasonally. Cempedak trees bear seasonal fruits while nangka are non-seasonal. Since we have cempedak-looking fruits that bear throughout the year, we think it is a crossbreed.

So far, the landscape and orchard maintenance team has numbered all the durian trees and located them on a spot plan. Each durian tree is tagged with an aluminium plate that has a number in red paint. All diseased trees have been treated regularly, but so far, we have lost 5 trees to stem canker disease and 1 to landslide. A big challenge is to protect the durian fruits from fruit borer damage without having to carry out any spraying. This we managed quite successfully by bagging the small durian fruits with newspaper bags suspended from a long pole. It takes some skill and experience (and some stiff necks) as the SBS die-hard helpers find out. But the fun is in the doing as Ng Kian Chong, Chen Sew Kian, Saw Kheng Hong (our orchard worker) and Tan Heng Ghee (a volunteer from Penang) found out. As an added insurance, we have planted the natural insecticide tree, the neem (Azadirachta indica) to deter insects and termites from going near the durian trees. Initially our biggest setback was finding a reliable, experience orchard worker. In the beginning there were two unreliable workers, one after the other. We were third time lucky with Saw. Meanwhile many volunteers rallied to help in taking a census of the durian trees, labelling them and bagging the durian and cempedak-nangka fruits. Andy, Andrew, Mr and Mrs Chin, Ah Chew the 4-D caster, Ah Seng the ‘koay kak’ seller and the Tan brothers from Penang are just a handful.

Landscaping SBS takes on a new challenge - erosion control of exposed slopes due to building development - because of its super-hilly terrain. For that, we are helping Dr Soo Kian Sin, our geotechnical engineering consultant, to prevent erosion by maintaining the slope vegetation and planting vetiver grass and creeping legume plants as anti-erosion agents. In addition, we have produced some preliminary landscape plans and plant species to beautify the compounds of the multipurpose hall, abbot’s vihara, water sima and kutis. An ornamental nursery has been started recently in SBS, under the shade of a big durian tree beneath the first kuti, to propagate the plants required, such as weeping willow, pokok kembang pukul lapan, camwood tree, duranta gold, jasmine, vetiver grass and Indian cork tree. Lim Hooi Siang, another of our landscape consultants, is generously assisting in the landscaping project.

We still need plenty of plants such as the spider lily, water lily, lotus and different colours of heliconia and would certainly welcome contributions from devotees and well wishers. We hope to plant as many trees and plants collected by devotees and well wishers and watch them grow as SBS matures. By so doing, we will feel closer to SBS whenever we visit.