Raising a Baby Pigeon
There is a small tree house for pigeons on my way to work. The white birds in residence have just hatched babies before they both disappeared. The next day, I found myself with 2 weird looking birds on a plastic tray. I have only held a budgie’s babies previously, and they looked like tiny aliens when they don’t have their feathers yet. With these two baby pigeons, I found their features more pronounced and a little scary...
3 Simple New Year’s Resolution Ideas that could Change your Life
Changing is harder than doing nothing. So when you feel motivated to change something like most people do on the first days of a new year, GRAB IT! A new year’s resolution may have been meant to be broken for you, but if you pick 1 of these 3 simple ideas, we might just be able to stick one through. 1. Do 1 thing new each month of the year. Have you ever heard the saying that “Growth happens outside your comfort...
A Year in Photos 2015: A Beginner’s Permaculture Garden
A permaculture garden is a garden design where we model Nature for success. It doesn’t have the pristine look that we usually see from modern gardens. Instead, you’ll find dead leaves, piles of branches everywhere – a somewhat untidy sight actually, if you’re not used to it. But what you can also have from a permaculture garden are abundant organic harvest, fresh eggs, a very healthy soil and a beautiful garden...
A Year in Review: How to Write a Personal Annual Review and What to Get Out of It
Can you believe it’s only 11 days before 2016? We’ll be having a long Christmas break at work this year. Apart from the parties, reunions and the long rest, I am also finding myself excited to start working again on my Year in Review project. It’s a personal project where you write about the things that happened during the year and decide on what you’d like to do for the next year and in the future, if any. So...
Having Chickens in the Garden
Yep, we’ve got chickens! After setting up our vegetable plots and trellises, we decided to raise some chickens to help us in our permaculture garden. The photo on the right is our first chicken family in September and now Mama Hen is already with her new set of cute little chicks. So how do chickens help us in the garden? They help with composting. We let them scratch and poop on our compost heap. Our chickens are free-range...
10 Short Videos that can Help You in Your Garden
Do you want to learn the basics of gardening in less than an hour? Here are the videos I wished I have seen when I was getting started. 1. Easiest Way to Tell if Your Soil is Healthy in Your Garden (2:09 mins) In this video, you will see what a healthy soil looks like. You will hear about the food soil web, composting, and worm castings. 2. Container Gardening (5:27 mins) I started planting in containers when I first got...
Attracting Butterflies to our Garden
We have more than 900 different species of butterflies here in the Philippines. Pictured on the right is a female Striped Albatross (Appias olfern), a regular visitor in our garden at this time. Aside from their beauty, butterflies also serve as pollinators for plants and food source for other animals like birds and spiders. Butterflies are also considered as indicator species. Because butterflies are sensitive to the changes in their...
3 Things I Learned Working on a Permaculture Garden
I wanted to start a permaculture garden here in Lucena. Articles about global warming, declining animal population and the like had me looking around to find something I could do for my part. I found permaculture after a couple of years and I felt it was exactly what I was looking for. It’s been a year now and let me share 3 main things that I learned during our first year of permaculture gardening. Things are a lot easier when...
The Bees and a Vegetable Garden in the Philippines
The buzzing sounds of bees in our garden in Lucena mean only one thing for me: more harvests. Some people drive away bees thinking they eat the vegetables in their garden, when the truth is that the bees are needed by our plants to produce fruits and vegetables. Have you ever heard someone say that when you have few harvest, you put two flowers together so you’ll have more? That’s pollination – some version of hand...
Niyogyugan Festival 2015
It’s time for Quezon Province’s Niyogyugan Festival again! Below is this year’s Schedule of Activities: Aug 10 4:50 AM Perez Park – Umagang Kay Ganda Coverage Opening of Agri-tourism Trade Fair Pre-judging of BB. Niyogyugan 2015 Festival Wear Competition Santan (Matamis na Bao) sa Quezon (Cooking Contest) Coco Exhibit Aug 11 8:00 AM...
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