Posted in Gardening

Organic Gardening

We often heard organic food, organic gardening and organic horticulture, but what does it really means? Defining the term organic will be difficult but when you say organic food, it only means one thing, food that are grown without the use of fertilizers and other chemicals. Organic horticulture is the science of growing foods following the principle of organic agriculture.

Organic Agriculture or Organic farming is the form of agriculture that relies on crop rotation, green manure, compost, biological pest control, organically approved pesticide application and mechanical cultivation to maintain soil productivity and control pests, excluding or strictly limiting the use of synthetic fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, plant growth regulators, livestock antibiotics, food additives, and genetically modified organisms. (wikipedia.com)

Organic farming does not really increase the productivity of harvest drops. So why is organic farming gaining more popularity? Because through organic farming, the soil productivity is preserved thus making a piece of land have longer life span in terms of planting. In the long run, organic farming can yield more harvest.

What will you need if you opt for organic farming/ gardening? Some people thought that organic farming is expensive, I even read from one of my marce blog that a certain foreigner says that we cannot afford organic farming. Excuse me mr foreigner but organic farming has been in the Philippines long before your big companies introduced pesticides to us. You can buy organic products from the people in the province (in fact my mom use to buy organic rice, organic crops and everything organic from a town near her place). To start organic farming is to learn the basic of organic agriculture, as it was mentioned above, the use of organic fertlizers and crop rotation, remember that the main goal of organic farming is to maintain the productivity of the soil.

Tomato Season

It’s Tomato season once again. I learned from my experience that tomatoes grows from January to April. Plant a tomato in January and you will harvest it around March to April. Last year, I was able to plant some on my small garden and harvested a lot of tomatoes. A tree can give you more than a kilo of tomatoes. This year, I forgot to plant one last January, makes me wish I had. Our family loves tomato, we put it in almost every dishes I prepare.

My mom says that in out province, tomato growers can even avail of health savings account from their tomato earnings. She says that during tomato season, farmers harvest a lot of tomato from their farms. I won’t have that much tomato since I only have a small piece of land to plant tomatoes, but still, there is much big difference on eating your home grown tomatoes from market bought tomatoes.

My Dream Backyard

If we are to have our own house, I want it to have a big lawn. A lawn where we can plant fruit bearing trees. And as my first born son says, a lawn where they can have a tree and they can pretend monkeys. If we only live in the province, we won’t have problems looking for trees. Here, we have to go to the nearest ecopark to be bale to play and climb trees. If money will allow us, we will buy a big lot, plant a lot of trees and install a pond. Our pond will have the best pressurized pond filter to prevent it from being dirty and saturated.We will put a lot of fish there. I can just imagine how our backyard will look. In the front, we will have a small pond and a garden of flowers and one or two fruit bearing trees. At the back, we will plant vegetables and a lot of fruit bearing trees. And we can even have a tree house!

Dreaming can be really fun!