My gardening Journey
Every afternoon, at the stroke of five. I sit outside in my garden and lift my head up to the sky.
I listen to birds chirping and kids playing, and if I am lucky there is a soft breeze and large doves or cranes flying above. I look at the clouds and without fail, think to myself I am blessed to be surrounded by all this nature. Under the sky, in the middle of my garden, watching the sunset is when I am happiest. I have found peace in my gardens. And I can say with certainty that my gardens changed my life.
Hello, my name is Raia and this is the story of my journey as a so-called gardener.
I am not a pandemic plantita, I have been at it long before the term plantita became popular, which isn’t to say I always had a natural propensity for gardening and plants. My relationship with plants and nature wasn’t something I actively wanted, I was never into plants as a child or a young adult, I would think people generally liked gardens and found certain plants and flowers lovely but the cultivation of said plants wasn’t something I was interested in. I always associated it with older people, a frumpy kind of endeavor relegated to housewives and lolas or hard labor done by silent and brawny hardineros.
You could say that when we decided to move to our new house, located in a former ricefield I inherited from my family, I basically had no choice but to embrace the whole farm lifestyle and become a plantita.
In the beginning I was just interested in establishing a vegetable patch near our house, and then planting some fruit trees around the property. We barely had any funds left after the house was built so landscaping the yard was out of the question. There was a house and a vast open field, and that was it.
When I look at older pictures of our house, how rough and unfinished it was, I tend to cringe with how ugly it all was. But it was new and we were so happy to have built something from scratch and to be on our own. It felt like such an accomplishment considering how much we struggled as a family. So yeah, we were happy despite the farm being mostly a big useless grassland at that point.
I listen to birds chirping and kids playing, and if I am lucky there is a soft breeze and large doves or cranes flying above. I look at the clouds and without fail, think to myself I am blessed to be surrounded by all this nature. Under the sky, in the middle of my garden, watching the sunset is when I am happiest. I have found peace in my gardens. And I can say with certainty that my gardens changed my life.
Hello, my name is Raia and this is the story of my journey as a so-called gardener.
I am not a pandemic plantita, I have been at it long before the term plantita became popular, which isn’t to say I always had a natural propensity for gardening and plants. My relationship with plants and nature wasn’t something I actively wanted, I was never into plants as a child or a young adult, I would think people generally liked gardens and found certain plants and flowers lovely but the cultivation of said plants wasn’t something I was interested in. I always associated it with older people, a frumpy kind of endeavor relegated to housewives and lolas or hard labor done by silent and brawny hardineros.
You could say that when we decided to move to our new house, located in a former ricefield I inherited from my family, I basically had no choice but to embrace the whole farm lifestyle and become a plantita.
In the beginning I was just interested in establishing a vegetable patch near our house, and then planting some fruit trees around the property. We barely had any funds left after the house was built so landscaping the yard was out of the question. There was a house and a vast open field, and that was it.
When I look at older pictures of our house, how rough and unfinished it was, I tend to cringe with how ugly it all was. But it was new and we were so happy to have built something from scratch and to be on our own. It felt like such an accomplishment considering how much we struggled as a family. So yeah, we were happy despite the farm being mostly a big useless grassland at that point.
This was our big open field five years ago when we first settled in our farm. It was just a whole lot of grass but we loved it anyway. It's way better looking now, but I also miss how it looked when we started, or perhaps I just miss how I felt back then.
I would wake up and look out onto that field and feel a world of possibilities.
I would wake up and look out onto that field and feel a world of possibilities.
I went into gardening a blank slate. I was the type of person who did not know how to identify plants. You could show me a tomato plant and I would call it an okra, I was that stupid about it. So I learned. I did my research, I read books on organic farming and took a course on Organic Agriculture at the open university nearby. I had so much fun going on “field trips,” visiting other farms and learning all sorts of farming methods and techniques. I started to plan our own farm and established a recycling system for all our waste. We bought worms for our compost pit and I would make plant juices like IMO (indigenous microorganisms) that helped fertilize and keep plants healthy.
I became obsessed with the right soil mixes for my veggie patch and plants. I would travel to different towns to buy cow dung and carbonized rice hull. My husband thought me a bit crazy when I came home one day so happy with my sacks of cow dung, and then lovingly caressing said dung into my soil mixes and compost pit. Who would have thought cow dung would one day bring me such joy?
My first big realization back then was that being a farm in an urban area surrounded by subdivisions did not give me the materials I needed for an organic farm, ingredients for organic farm inputs were hard to come by. Things like rice hull and carbonized rice hull for soil mixes, molasses for plant juices, and cow dung for composts and fertilizers are things people took for granted in the countryside; but here in the suburbs of Laguna I had to travel farther off to buy these components that people got for free or gave away to each other as needed in their farms. Hence my unbridled joy at procuring cow dung for my gardens.
I became obsessed with the right soil mixes for my veggie patch and plants. I would travel to different towns to buy cow dung and carbonized rice hull. My husband thought me a bit crazy when I came home one day so happy with my sacks of cow dung, and then lovingly caressing said dung into my soil mixes and compost pit. Who would have thought cow dung would one day bring me such joy?
My first big realization back then was that being a farm in an urban area surrounded by subdivisions did not give me the materials I needed for an organic farm, ingredients for organic farm inputs were hard to come by. Things like rice hull and carbonized rice hull for soil mixes, molasses for plant juices, and cow dung for composts and fertilizers are things people took for granted in the countryside; but here in the suburbs of Laguna I had to travel farther off to buy these components that people got for free or gave away to each other as needed in their farms. Hence my unbridled joy at procuring cow dung for my gardens.
My recycling and waste segregation system and early attempts at composting
My home made organic concoctions for plants like OHN and FPJ
Planting seeds, transplanting them, watching them flower and grow fruit, and then harvesting my first crops was such a wondrous experience for me. Everything was so new, and each plant a baby of sorts for me. I documented my first harvest with such care, it was a quasi-religious experience really or rather like falling in love and being so drunk on it.
That is how I remember my first vegetable patch. My succeeding vegetable crops would never surpass the experience of my first veggies. They were my epiphany. It changed the way I viewed nature and my concept of people’s relationship with the natural world. The practice of gardening, the learning process of it, falling in love with all of it – all these changed how I viewed contentment and living with nature.
In learning how to become a gardener, I felt a connection to the land and the living world outside of my own little life and it gave me a sense of perspective that I have never really grasped before. The curiosity and wonderment that I’ve lost as a stressed-out adult were returned to me through things as seemingly inconsequential as my first tomato or my first pechay harvest.
I would walk through my garden in the early morning mist, savoring the cool air and the wet grass and crouch down to see my first ampalaya and feel a happiness I haven’t felt in a long time.
I used to think people who took up gardening were folks who were at the end of their interesting lives, their adventures long over and accomplishments way behind them. It was something to pass the time while waiting for oblivion. Now, I just feel sorry for that former self who looked down on things sublime, things she did not or could not understand then.
There is this whole new world I have discovered on this journey and I am grateful for the privilege of this experience. I think myself wiser somehow. But mostly I am just plain happy. My face turned up to the sky, my plants looking up with me.