Home Gardening Philippines – Gardening for food in the city, where land and space are limited, was once impossible for urban settlers. Urban gardening is now gaining interest in cities, especially in Metro Manila.
This interest in planting more has become a growing opportunity for urbanites. The COVID-19 lockdown periods have forced most of them to plant food in their homes. In addition, government programs promote urban gardening to address the food security and nutrition concerns of Filipinos.
Home Gardening Philippines
Of the many technologies, urban gardening is the most suitable and adaptable to “being at home”. With the right production system, materials and costs, you can enjoy fresh clean, ready-to-cook vegetables at your place. Households are not the only ones to benefit; communities with unused land can be transformed into community urban gardens and serve as a venue for hands-on training and workshops.
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In the GALING-Kontra COVID-19 program, Gulayan sa Pamayanan is one of the component projects. This project aims to provide science and technology (S&T) based livelihoods in vegetable horticulture in metropolitan areas as a means to address food availability and accessibility concerns.
Under this project, two urban gardening technologies are initially adopted in Metro Manila. These are Enriched Pot Preparation (EPP) and Simple Nutrient Replenishment Program (SNAP) hydroponics technologies.
The Department of Science and Technology of the National Capital Region (DOST-NCR) has already installed EPP kits in selected barangays Las Pinas, Paranaque and Sampaloc, Manila. SNAP kits will soon be rolled out in these areas as well.
DOST-NCR is implementing the Gulayan sa Pamayanan project based on the monitoring guidelines of the Philippine Agriculture, Water and Natural Resources Research and Development Council of the DOST through its Agricultural Resources Management Research Division (-ARMRD).
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EPP production technology was developed by dr. Eduardo P. Paningbatan, Jr., retired professor, University of the Philippines Los Banjos (UPLB). He formulated a compost soil extract (CSE) nutrient solution. EPP technology uses compost, coconut husk, CSE and recycled soft drink bottles as potting medium containers. According to Dr. Paningbatan, the EPP technology provides urban families with healthy and pesticide-free vegetables such as lettuce, kangkong and tomatoes. It can be used to grow herbs such as basil, oregano and rosemary for flavoring, health and medicine as well as ornamentals such as euphorbia, cactus and chamomile. EPP plants can be hung or placed on a stand where there is at least three hours of sunlight.
The SNAP technology package and nutrient solution were developed by Dr. Primitivo Jose A. Santos and Mr. Eureka Teresa M. Ocampo of the Institute of Plant Breeding, University of the Philippines Los Banos (IPB-UPLB).
SNAP is soilless vegetable growing that uses Styrofoam boxes, Styrofoam cups, growing media and SNAP nutrient solution. According to IPB-UPLB, “SNAP hydroponics is the best for growing vegetables at home and is ideal for small urban spaces. It is easy to set up, maintain and operate, requiring only sufficient sunlight, air movement and protection. Additionally, SNAP does not require electricity compared to with other hydroponics systems because it has passive aeration of the nutrient solution used.SNAP hydroponics can be installed in greenhouses, terraces and house awnings.
Both EPP and SNAP Hydroponics technologies are inexpensive for urban gardening because most of the materials needed to build the system are recycled materials. They also require less manpower and less maintenance. Ofelia Bagotlo, co-founder of the Philippine Homeless Federation, describes how community gardens in vacant city lots provide vital nutrition for the urban poor.
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A series of blogs and interviews exploring what social, political and environmental factors drive the boom or bust of cities
I work at the Philippine Homeless Federation in Payatas, which is in District 2 of Quezon City. Quezon City is part of the Manila metropolitan area and is the largest city in the Philippines, both in terms of population and urban poverty.
Half of the city’s population lives in urban slums, and the 2nd district is the most densely populated. The Federation was born in
(District Government Area) Payat, where I live, and its innovative savings groups were formed and managed by waste pickers who lived in the slums surrounding the mountainous garbage dump at its center.
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This is the latest in a series of blogs and interviews, curated by Senior Fellow David Satterthwaite, exploring various aspects of global urban change. This is the second blog to report on the work of the Philippine Homeless Federation during the pandemic. The first, by Ruby Papeleras and Migo Gaddi, chronicled community responses to COVID-19.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been going on in the Philippines for over a year now, and we still don’t know how long it will last.
In addition to the dire health situation, people have lost their jobs and cannot go out to look for work. Due to the shutdown and closure of transport systems, people are forced to stay in their homes and cannot go out to earn money.
Middle-class families may be able to manage under these restrictions, but the urban poor on a day-to-day basis really suffer, especially when it comes to food. Without income, families can’t put food on the table and there is a lot of hunger.
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Some time ago, a friend from the Quezon City Municipal Office called me and invited me to join a project initiated by our city mayor, Joy Belmonte, in the field of food conservation.
Food is now our serious need, so we were ready to join. The mayor made urban farming a reality in her city program, so she wanted to work with grassroots women and grassroots organizations to turn unused urban land into gardens.
So a small group of us started looking for free land in our parish to start a garden. About a kilometer from my place in Payat is the village of Amlac, where we found a vacant plot of about 450 square meters. We first spoke to the landowner and then to the village president to ask if we could start cultivating that land. They agreed.
We started with just three women. I asked our parish priest to spread the word that if anyone wants to join us, we will grow vegetables together on that empty land. As a result, more people joined us.
Maintaining A Vegetable Garden
At first we split into five groups to do some gardening. We have some young guys in the community who helped us clear the land and make the beds. The mayor provided us with seed starter kits, and we made organic liquid fertilizers ourselves from kitchen waste. A friend taught me how to do this, so I was able to teach others in our group.
Slowly, slowly, the vegetables we planted grew – leafy greens, tomatoes, long beans, bitter gourds, eggplants, squash, peppers, radishes, onions and even bananas. And our project also grew.
Now our group of volunteer gardeners has grown to 38. We are mostly women, but some men have joined us. We sell some vegetables to make money, but most of them are for our members to take home so they can put nutritious food on the table for their families.
The Mayor visited our city’s community garden in Amlac. She was so happy that even though people don’t have jobs, they don’t have the opportunity to earn money and they don’t have enough money to buy things, they happily pick the vegetables they grow themselves. Food is not a problem for us now, because of the vegetables we grow in our garden.< /p>
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Watch Bagotlo explain how community gardens provide food security for the urban poor. The title of the video refers to an earlier blog in which community leaders from the Indian Federation of Women’s Savings Groups set out their priorities, one of which was “green in our meals”.
Other groups in town are doing the same. There are now 160 community vegetable gardens on vacant lots throughout Quezon City, providing nutritious food and supplemental income to thousands of low-income urban farmers and their families.
In our district, 2.11 hectares of unused land has been converted into vegetable farms. We hear from our friends at the federation in Iloilo City that the municipal government wants to replicate this community gardening project there.
The mayor and a city councilor asked me to attend training courses on agribusiness and organic farming so that I could pass on those ideas and techniques to other communities that want to grow their own vegetables.
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Now I realize that people who live in a poor urban area cannot do this kind of gardening on their own – especially in a crisis like ours.
We need to help each other and work with the government to get land for farming and spread the knowledge of how to grow healthy, organic vegetables. This is not the time to fight the authorities or complain so much.
Now we have to help each other. If every city government could do what our mayor has done for us, help us
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