Here, on top of a commercial building within the heart of the city of Kuala Lumpur, we have 2,000 Sweet Melon plants growing happily in the open sided hot houses as shown below. Rainwater collected from the 800 sq m of canopy over the hothouses is more than enough to serve the 2,000 plants. Note the growing medium used - broken bricks the size of golf balls. Over the years, we have developed and perfected the Autopot technique (very different from all other hydroponic systems such as NFT and drip to waste) of accurately dose the nutrients to the plants without the salt build up problems many hydroponics experts expect. There is no run-off and no flushing is needed. The yields are good and the flavour of the melons is consistently outstanding. The sweetness measures an average brix reading of 14. The fruit are uniform and free from blemishes.

This is a project being undertaken by the Government to try to get youths back into farming. Modern methods of farming may be more appealing to them than the old ways.

 Sunday, 23 April 2006
Having solved one problem by using rooftops for highly efficient crop production, we created another problem.  This is the lack of natural pollination by insects, particularly bees. To overcome the fruit set problems, we have to resort to hand pollination. Transferring bee hives to the rooftop is the targetted option and we are working on it. Another option is to use chemical sprays that can make the female flowers develop into normal fruits without pollination. Otherwise the crop has been doing extremely well and will be ready for harvesting soon. It should look similar or better than this picture.

The rooftop project has been very successful. The melons have been harvested and are consistently sweet. However not all melons are of the same size, they vary between 1.2 to 2.5 kg per fruit. That is the problem because the buyer from a large supermarket chain prefers all fruits to be around 1.2 kg each. One way to do this would be to restrict the size of the fruit to within a specified dimension that would give 1.2 kg in weight. It would also be better if we could produce a square fruit. Hence, the middle picture showing our first attempt in achieving that objective.

If all the fruits were square it would make them much more marketable because their novelty and appeal. Also, in these days of high freight costs (due to rising fuel costs), we could save by packing more fruits into a container.

Click here to view Gravity Fed Commercial Sweet Melon Project in Malaysia.