Want More Nutritious Food and Income? Plan a Mixed Legume-Leafy-Spice Home Garden

Home Garden, How to Do It by Dr. Mike in the Philippines

Traditional home gardens in northern Philippines range from 20 to 100 square meters. Planted normally are a mixture of sweet potato, yam, corn, beans, and a tree or two of avocado, pomelo, and guava.

Sounds good but not so good. It is important to have a plan in developing a home garden. These tips can help you:

A. In the garden,
1. Consider where the sun rises from because you should not plant crops that will shade other crops. Do storey planting where shorter plants are fully exposed to sunlight before the taller ones. (eg. pechay, eggplants, corn). Thus, crop orientation is important.

2. Look at your soil. Does it need more fertilizer?. Reddish to brownish soils indicate lack of NPK nutrients. if you don't know how to get soil sample, the most appropriate thing to do is increase your NPK levels. What will you use? Use organic fertilizer for basal application. If you intend to plant green leafy vegetables, use compost made out from nitrogen fixing plants and trees (eg. centrosima, caliandra, alnus). If you will plant fruit-bearing veggies or tuber-producing crops, increase potassium and phosphorus basal fertilizer.

It is also important to know if your soil needs to be watered regularly or not. How will you know? Get a handful of soil from your tilled garden, close your fist on it until you make a lump, raise your hand and drop it on the ground. If it does not break freely, your soil is too soggy, you don't need to water every other day. But if the soil breaks freely into many parts, then your soil is too dry, water every other day.

Now examine your soil. Do you have earthworms, century bugs and tiny critters/ if yes, you have a good soil. If you don't see anything moving or crawling, you do a damn "dead soil", that's not too good.

3. Protecting your plant is of utmost important. But remember, if you have the right to produce, you have the responsibility to produce safe and nutritious crops. Always consider the need to make the environment safe and clean and the rights of consumers. Never try to poison both. Ordinarily, the main pests of vegetables are slugs, snails and caterpillars (of many different insects), are the worst enemies.

To rid of slugs and snail especially in your seedbeds, put a cup of beer in a can and place it at the edge or rim of your seedbed. These attracts the pests and fall into the can. In the morning, dispose the pests. For caterpillars, put 15 to 20 cigarette butts in a liter of water and let them stay there for a week. The nicotene and tar of the cigarette butt mixes with the water eventually. Use this to spray against caterpillars.

Okay guys, more next time so drop by.

Michael the Gardener

Staying Home: Father and Son

Staying Home: Father and Son
By Michael A. Bengwayan

Writer, Journalist - Philippines


Yesterday as I was pulling our cows to the barn with my 18-year-old son at our small house in Longlong, La Trinidad, Philippines, he told me, “Dad, school days are near and it rains every day. What a time to start school.” I stopped and wondered. What a time indeed.
Even for me who has to end my vacation and go back to work. It will be days involving deadlines, uncooperative sources or spats with editors—I grouse and rant thinking about it.

For more than a month, I did nothing but stay home with my son. We worked from eight to five laying poles to stretch hog wires to keep off stray dogs from the garden.

More than that, we talked. Talked like we never did before. He talked about how his math teachers seemed uglier and meaner than usual. How the school restrooms smelled more and more like ashtrays and that the world was fast coming to an end before he reached college.

I told him of the funeral pyres in Baktaphur, Nepal where they burn the poor corpses with a handful of rice straw and kick them down the river only to be ripped apart by waiting monkeys. Of working with the Harijans in Pune, Maharahstra, India where dead children are peddled for a bite of food, and of the dead and the dying in our own Mindanaoland where Muslim children are raised as young guns to fight invisibly against war-tested Philippine troopers.


My work calls for me to travel around the Philippines and some countries most of the time. When he was born, I was in Ireland finishing a PhD; I stayed in other countries as he grew and every time I came home, I knew we both hankered for talk.

We talked and said that cynicism was our fault and the rest was the fault of the generation that lay before him (me included). Maybe the world would be better off had it not been for people who went ahead of him, he said. I could only nod in agreement, knowing indeed, there is truth to the innocent thought he passed.

In between gasps and a drink of water I glanced at my son. Fast growing, eager to go out and face the world, whatever the world has to give. I never thought of it much, as work has always preoccupied me.

For many of us, work lays claim to our time and emotion, possessing us completely as any spouse or child. But those of us who think we have hard jobs can learn a lot from those who really do.

I wondered how the people I saw working against nature in Quezon to pull out dying and dead victims from the typhoon's wrath get the strength to do so. I wonder how some people counsel rape victims, investigate murder scenes, operate on dying patients, then have the energy to cheer their kids' local basketball team on Saturdays. I now wondered how, my son, battered an defeated with his sepak takraw team go home and smile to say, “The game was great dad!”

If the rest of us can't keep the stress of work from oozing over and staining the rest of life, how can they? More to the point: If they can, why on earth can't we?


When we separate the perspective of our silent privacy to that of working for life, we lose perspective. Other people build walls and maintain distance. My good friend Dr. Charles Cheng sometimes calls me to have coffee with him. We don't talk much. He asks how my day was, I ask him the same question in return. Then we let the dying minutes pass with no word exchanged. He has a bad day. I keep mum. Keeping up walls is the secret to coping with the pain when we feel defeated, lost, and unsure.

This is a lesson for me whose work is not a matter of life and death, but has the ability to use us up nonetheless. The only way to get the work done is to come up for air periodically. To turn off the computer, even on a deadline, and be there for your wife when she comes home tired from work. To say hell with the writing job you're organizing in your mind even as your editor keeps calling you, and smile to your children when they arrive home.

So we can all go out again tomorrow and do it all again.

I am happy I spent my vacation with son.

“I had a nice vacation with you, Dad,” my son says pulling the last cow inside the barn. “So did I,” I said. “Let's go home, dinner is waiting.”



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Michael Bengwayan is a journalist based in Manila, the Philippines. He specializes in environmental, developmental, and related issues.

Organic Gardening Threatening Bees in Luzon, Philipines

The apiculture industry in north Luzon is in danger of declining because of organic gardening. Does this sound crazy? Read on. This is because organic gardeners are cutting all visible wild sunflower plants (Tithanium diversilfolium) which they widely compost for fertilizer. As a result, the bees in this region that depend heavily on nectar and pollen produced by the sunflowers, have difficulty foraging for food.

The Cordillera Ecological Education, Training, Research and Information Center (PINE TREE) is helping remedy this problem.It is planting sunflower cuttings in the mountains especially where there are no farmers. I am calling for people concerned to help us in this regard.

Michael