Want to growing GIANT vegetables? with organic farming???

I grew up in the company of women who had the greenest thumbs I know. My mother who has the penchant for snapping off branches (sorry neighbors, hehehe) of interesting plants and see it grow to maturity. While my Manay (my yaya for 30+ years, or “ate” in Bicolano) can stick anything on the ground and harvest its fruits when the time is ripe (she was a practicing organic farmer when the term did not even exist yet). We’ve had papayas, langkas, saba, atsuete, and even corn growing in the vacant lots surrounding our house in the heart of Q.C.

Giant spinach leaves, anyone?

Unfortunately, I have had the “fortune” of not inheriting their green thumb. In fact my Manay has always told me my hands were too warm for gardening, so I never gotten the interest to prove her wrong.  But I have to admit, I always nurtured the idea that I can make a decently pretty garden when I set my mind to it.

To date I have only been able to successfully plant carabao grass on our small patch of soil (duhhh, I know it’s a no-brainer but just as satisfying).  And, most noteworthy are my GIANT spinach leaves last summer.  Well, I can’t take credit for that, hehehe.  Nature did 100% work on that one.

The tiniest vegetable patch gave us a harvest of more than 4 meals' worth of GIANT spinach leaves.

My Manay planted the roots of spinach I purchased one Sunday in the Lung Center Organic Market, hoping that we can harvest the leaves in a short while.  The plants were nothing spectacular, so we forgot about it as it flowered and seeds came out.  After the mother plant died out, we were surprised to see we had GIANT spinach leaves growing in another part of the garden, some of the leaves were the size of my palm!  (Thank you dear bird friends)  I was hesitant to serve this to my family at first because it was so unusual to say the least.

But after talking to my different sukis of organic vegetables, I was relieved to find out that the soil was probably still very rich that the plant was able to fully grow to what seemed like mutant vegetables!

With that “successful” no-effort gardening, my hubby, Xtian, toyed with the idea of planting our own organic vegetables.  Then last friday, with his efforts, a small group of co-parents in Juan’s school, was able to enlist the help of a veteran organic farmer, Tita Beth de Castro, to teach them the basics.

Tita Beth was given the opportunity to use a plot of land in the La Mesa Ecopark to do organic farming, with Ms. Gina Lopez as the benefactor.  She has been doing this for years and has been able to grown strawberries , shared this valuable farming methods even to families in Payatas.

Photo Courtersy of Earthworm Sanctuary: Look at Earthworm Sancutary's harvest!

We are so looking forward to the time we can harvest for our own daily vegetable meals.  I’ll share more on this with you as we learn more, who knows, it might just really be as easy as sticking that twig on the ground after all.  You think??

La Mesa Ecopark Earthworm Sanctuary
Multiply site: http://earthwormsanctuary.multiply.com
Contact Nos.: 0922 896 1996 or 931-2617