Camotes Farm: Fencing the Land and Dealing With What’s Already Growing There

Hey, Daniel here!

Quick update from the side project. Beyond the main Cebu build, I bought a few thousand square meters of farm land in Camotes, about a 15-minute walk from Santiago Bay. Price was around ₱300/sqm, all due diligence done before signing (titles, tax dec, neighbors, access, water, the whole list).

Now it’s mine and the real work starts: fencing it and figuring out what to plant. And just as importantly, figuring out what’s already there that needs to come out.

Fencing: GI Tubes + Barbed Wire, Not Concrete

First decision: how to fence it. Concrete fence on a lot this size would have cost more than the land itself. Total non-starter for a hobby farm.

So I went with GI tubes as posts and barbed wire as the fence material. Not pretty, but it’s:

• Cheap per linear meter
• Fast to install (auger + cement footing per post + run wire)
• Animal- and trespass-resistant enough for a rural ag lot
• Easy to repair if a typhoon takes out a section

That’s exactly what you want on land you’re not living on yet.

The Plumbing Cap Trick

The detail I’m pretty happy with: the open tops of GI tubes will rust from the inside out the moment rain gets in. Standard fix is a welded cap or a plug. I used something simpler that worked perfectly:

Plastic plumbing end caps that fit the tube OD exactly. Push them on, seal with epoxy underneath, done.

You can see them in the header photo - the orange caps sitting on top of every post. They:

• Stop rainwater entering the tube
• Don’t require a welder on site
• Cost a few pesos per post
• Look surprisingly tidy

Belt and braces, I also sprayed every tube with rust-proof primer plus a finish coat before installation. Salt air rolls in from Santiago Bay, and a bare GI tube outdoors here has a much shorter life than people think.

That’s basically my entire fence-prep kit. Paint tray, rust-proof paint, plumbing caps, a couple of brushes, and patience. Repeat for every post.

The posts then get planted with a small concrete footing and the barbed wire is strung between them at three or four heights:

Cheap, effective, and reversible if I want to upgrade to something else later.

What’s Already Growing There

With the perimeter going up, I started walking the land more carefully to plan what to plant. That’s when I noticed a shrub I didn’t recognize growing along one of the boundaries:

I ran it through AI for an ID. Verdict: Jatropha gossypiifolia, locally called tuba-tuba. Common in the Philippines. Looks decorative. Not friendly.

I almost left it because “I’m not raising animals, what’s the worst that happens?” But the more I dug, the more obvious it was that I should pull it now.

Why Tuba-Tuba Has to Go Even Without Livestock

Here’s the honest reasoning - this is the summary of the research I did:

1. The Real Risk Is Children, Not Animals

The documented Philippine cases are kids, not goats. Ten school-aged children in Lucena City were hospitalised after eating tuba-tuba seeds. Just one seed caused symptoms. A child who ate 10+ seeds developed hypovolaemic shock. Vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, dizziness within 1-4 hours.

The seeds look like small, harmless nuts. Kids eat them. My situation:

• My daughter Camille will visit the farm with me
• Future kids, nieces/nephews, visiting family
• The caretaker’s children
• Neighbors’ kids wandering in from adjacent lots (normal rural Philippine reality)
• Farm workers during planting and harvest

You cannot control every visitor’s curiosity. A toxic seed-producing plant near a fence line where anyone walks past is an avoidable hazard.

2. I’ll Be Eating What Grows on This Land

This is a hobby farm. Vegetables, fruits, herbs. Jatropha sap and seed oil are purgative and irritant. Sap drips on whatever’s underneath. Seeds fall, roll, end up in vegetable beds. Pollen and plant debris contact anything adjacent.

Not a risk worth taking next to food crops.

3. The Caretaker Has to Handle It

Every weeding pass, every monthly slash, the bolo contacts that plant. Jatropha sap causes contact dermatitis in some people. Not life-threatening, but unpleasant and avoidable.

4. It Spreads

This is the point most people miss. Jatropha is seed-dispersed and self-colonising. One plant becomes twenty within a few years. I’d be removing it eventually anyway - bigger, harder, with more seeds already in the soil. Better to do it now while it’s a single shrub.

5. It Provides Nothing of Value to the Farm

Nothing in the left column is unique. If I want purple ornamental leaves, I can plant Graptophyllum pictum (caricature plant), Pseuderanthemum, or a red Cordyline (ti plant) - all non-toxic and widely available locally.

Plants That Are Actually Fine to Keep

Just so the category is clear, these I’m not removing:

• Kakawate (madre de cacao) - seeds slightly toxic but not palatable, useful for nitrogen fixing and fence posts
• Ipil-ipil - mildly toxic to ruminants in quantity, fine for humans
• Neem (Azadirachta indica) - medicinal, pest-repellent, safe
• Malunggay - completely edible, planting more
• Hagonoy - mild allelopathy but not a real toxicity concern

Jatropha is not in this category. Different risk profile entirely.

Removal Plan

Fifteen-minute job:

1. Gloves on
2. Cut stem at the base
3. Dig out the root
4. Bag everything (leaves, stem, flowers, any seeds)
5. Dispose off-property - not compost, not burn-while-green
6. Walk the perimeter looking for other young plants
7. Mark the spot to check again in a few months for regrowth from missed root pieces

That’s it. Done.

The Mental Pattern Worth Catching

This is the bit I want to remember for the rest of the farm work, because it’ll come up again.

I almost talked myself out of dealing with the Jatropha because I was looking for reasons to reduce work - “no animals, so maybe I can skip it.” Reasonable instinct, but on a farm with an absentee owner, small unresolved problems compound. One Jatropha you leave because “it’s fine” becomes 10 in two years. The caretaker won’t flag it as a problem, because to him it’s just another shrub.

The rule on a hobby farm with absentee ownership: handle small problems immediately, because there’s no one else watching. Ten minutes of work today saves a real removal job in a couple of years.

What’s Next on the Farm

With the fence going up and the toxic clearance underway, the next steps:

• Finish the perimeter fence (still a few sections to do)
• Build a small caretaker’s structure for tools and shade
• Mark zones for planting: kakawate windbreak, fruit trees (mango, marang, calamansi), malunggay perimeter, and a kitchen-garden area for herbs and leafy vegetables
• Sort out water access (likely a shallow well plus rain catchment)
• Plant kakawate as living fence posts inside the GI line over time

Camotes is a slow-burn project - this isn’t supposed to be productive in year one. Year three or four is when it starts looking like an actual farm.

If you’ve cleared land in the Camotes group or anywhere coastal in the Visayas and have stories about plants you wish you’d removed earlier, would love to hear them. Easier to learn from somebody else’s regrets than to grow my own.