AS PART of its “Plant, Plant, Plant Program,” the Department of Agriculture (DA) has launched the Urban Agriculture Project.
DA secretary William D. Dar underscored the importance of the project in securing food for urban families, especially during the enhanced community quarantine period.
Thus, the new battlecry of the DA is “The threat of hunger is as real as the threat of COVID-19,” says Dar.
The “Plant, Plant, Plant Program” aims to further improve our food adequacy levels through increased food production, including that of attaining efficient food processing, marketing, and distribution to major consumption centers, Dar added.
For those residing in urban areas like Metro Manila who would want to have their own gardens but don’t have the land or space to plant vegetables, urban gardening is the answer.
This is one of the solutions in bringing and conducting agriculture in the urban setting.
For Mer Layson, an urban dweller and an advocate of urban gardening, this can be made possible thru the use of discarded bottles or containers.
For practicing urban gardening, one can have a ready supply of fresh vegetables, at the same time, beat the ever-increasing prices of vegetables in the market, aside from having a source of healthy food for their families.
This concept has been proven to flourish even in any available space, like windows, terraces, or in the very limited space of an apartment or high-rise condominium building.
According to Layson, who has been practicing urban gardening by utilizing the grills of his rented apartment in Manila, all you need are discarded plastic bottles which are cut in halves, pierced with small holes on the side, and filled with a small amount of soil, and presto! You now have the containers to plant different varieties of vegetables.
For his home-made receptacles which he dubbed “self-watering plant containers,” Layson was able to plant, and eventually harvest easy-to-grow vegetables like lettuce, mustard, pechay, including chilli pepper and other varieties.
With the use of improvised containers, the burden of watering the plants everyday will be eliminated.
Layson says you can use any size of discarded plastic bottles, depending of course on the variety of vegetable which you may want to cultivate.
For the different varieties of lettuce, Layson uses the 330 milliliter plastic bottles, but for the taller varieties like mustard and pechay, he uses the 1-liter or 1.5-liter soda bottles.
Another advantage of planting your own vegetables is that you can naturally grow them without the use of fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides.
Since the plants are just within reach and can be viewed or seen at any time of the day, pest infestation will not be a problem at all, according to Layson.
Aside from providing food, there are other benefits of urban or container gardening, such as, improving the nutritional status of your family, ensuring food security, possible generation of additional income if ever there is surplus in your production, and savings which could have been spent for buying vegetables in the local market. (jaypeeyap@ymail.com/PN)
