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Philippines: Community garden is a source of food, profit, and hope for community members displaced by the Zamboanga Siege

Fresh harvest from the ATIWA communal farm.

An unexpected but delightful side effect of the community garden is that it’s encouraged many barangay residents to start their own gardens either in their own backyards, or if their space is limited, in between houses.

By Yvette Natalie Tan
Manila Bulletin
Feb 21, 2021

Excerpt:

The housing office allocated 2000 sqm open space for the community garden, which is staffed by volunteers. “On the first day, 12 people helped, until it became seven, and then five,” Bahani shares in Tagalog. It took them two weeks to finish the garden with the help of trucks from the barangay and two paid laborers.

The garden grows several crops, including kamote, kangkong, carrots, Chinese mustard, ampalaya, upo, squash, patola, tomatoes, eggplant, alugbati, jicama, corn, onions, ginger, lemongrass, kadios (pigeon pea), monggo, sayote, bell pepper, sili, and kamoteng kahoy, as well as fruits like papaya and indigenous vegetables like talinum and saluyot.

The crops were chosen because they were fruits and vegetables that everyone ate: they were popular ingredients in the volunteer’s households and would be easy to harvest and sell. Bahani attributes the success of the garden to, “persistence, trust in each other, time (to cultivate the garden), and patience.”

As expected, the garden soon began to produce more than what its volunteers could consume, so they began to sell their harvests. “We only harvest when there’s a buyer,” Bahani explains. “We make a sale everyday. Sometimes we sell P265, sometimes P820.” She added that as of mid-2000, the organization had P26,345 in savings.

Read the complete article here.