Passionate gardening My passion for gardening goes back to those days when I was in the grade school and my mom had something to do with this. Our ancestral home in Parang, Mambulao, CamNorte, the Philippines, during the 50s-60s occupied an area equivalent to three home lots. And this extra area became our veggie garden, where patola, upo, kamote, pechay were grown and became part of our meals. My mom loved to grow foods alongside ornamental plants, which she sold to house plant lovers. The “surplus” veggie harvest was sold around the village, helping our household with some pesos for our daily needs. Just before I moved here in Papua New Guinea in 1993, I had a veggie garden in my former home at Pacita Complex, San Pedro, Laguna, the Philippines. It was a vacant lot that was earmarked as open space at our block, with a view of developing it into a children’s park. My house’s exact spot was at Phase 2, Block 3, Lot 18, Pacita Complex, just a stone’s throw away from the railroad used by commuters from Dasma, Cavite, as well as those from Pacita. I raised fast-growing veggies that included pechay, cabbage and chili among others. My neighbors also had their stakes at this lot, growing their own veggies. Twenty-one years later today, I have resurrected this gardening passion after an opportunity had presented itself. At the back of my flat here at Garden Glory Estate, 8-Mile, a housing area outside of Port Moresby, PNG, is a wide space that was so inviting for me to ignore. But the challenged is that it is a grass land that sits on a landfill. This area, I came to know later, was a swamp reclaimed by developers to make it a palatable piece of real estate, which it has become to be these days. But anyway, with help from my next door neighbor Daru, a Papua New Guinean mother, we inch by inch cleared the area to make way for our veggie raised beds, or the so-called veggie plots. It was tough to deal with the soil that contained rocks, clay and adobe. Under three inches of top soil is a wide swatch of adobe that had challenged my resolved to dig it and made it suitable for growing vegetables. Every morning at 7am, I would be in the garden with my pick mattock to make the dirt suitable for vegetable growing. Thank God, Daru and I were able to convert the area into a food garden, although there is still a wide area waiting to be cleared of tough grass and planted with growing food. Right now, I am growing long beans, ampalaya, eggplants, carrots, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, squash, spinach, basil and oregano. I have just started growing my favorite “gabi” (taro) and kangkong in a pond, which is fed by natural underground water. I also have some crops in containers, such as sweet potatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, tomatoes and carrots. My wife, who knows my love for gardening, sent me 15 types of veggie seeds (the commercially-raised ones), but they were seized by post office quarantine for being a prohibited import. Daru for her part, planted her space with cassava, bananas, sugarcane and fast-growing pechay and the like. We will deal with this tough soil, inch by inch. At the moment, we rejoice whenever we harvested the fruits of our labor. Gardening is enjoyable, and for me it has become a therapeutic early-morning exercise. And the prospect of picking a fruit or two from my okra, pole sitao or cucumber plants gets me excited every time, knowing that my next meal would be coming from the plants that I am growing. Like other gardeners around the world, I adhered to the golden rule of growing foods: take good care and love your crops, and they will love you back. – AP Hernandez, Port Moresby, PNG Pic 1.Birds eye view of my garden; capsicum fruits; eggplants in bloom, container sweet potatoes, tomatoes and eggplants. other pictures below from the garden.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 05:23:44 +0000