Tanza, Cavite—It was while living as an expat in Brunei that I learned to enjoy and appreciate gardening.
I was an accidental gardener. I got into it because my flat mate decided to return to Kuala Lumpur for good and I had to take care of the mini-garden she built in our balcony. At that time, I was just content with sprinkling some water on my succulent terrariums. But I suddenly found myself having to cultivate various herbs and this would require more time and energy than my low-maintenance terrariums. So I pored through lots of gardening websites and after some trial and error (and a few dead cactus, lemongrass and aloe-vera plants), I managed to keep my herb garden thriving and productive.
My gardening took some time away from my weekends, but it was such a rewarding hobby that I never minded the movies I never saw or my missed manicure appointments. Gardening relaxed me after a hectic day of editing stories and meetings and gave me a regular supply of aloe-vera gel for my hair, oregano leaves for my sauce, soup and tea and those sweet, fresh basil for my pesto. I was far from being self-sufficient, but those fresh herbs cut my grocery bills and encouraged me to prepare healthy meals from scratch. I was so not using my newly harvested oregano for a cup of instant noodles nor would I forego my pesto pasta just to buy nasi katok—the iconic cheap Brunei meal composed of fried chicken, rice and spicy sambal.
I was recalling my own gardening experience while visiting the school garden at Julugan Elementary School (JES) in Tanza, Cavite. The visit was part of the three-day workshop on school gardening and school feeding organized by the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR). Several delegates from Africa, India, Canada, the Philippines and the Caribbean presented papers on how school gardens and feeding helped in reducing incidence of malnutrition among schoolchildren and encouraging families to grow their own food and prepare nutritious and inexpensive meals.
JES is one of the schools included in the integrated school nutrition project funded by the Canada-based International Development Research Centre and implemented by IIRR, the Department of Education (DepEd) and the Department of Science and Techology’s Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI). The project, which started in 2012 and now includes 58 schools in Calabarzon area, was implemented because schools are considered as a strategic venue for delivering nutrition interventions to children and, indirectly, to their families and communities. The project has three components: gardening, supplementary feeding and nutrition education. The latter especially involves parents as teachers even go to family homes to make more parents aware that it’s easy to prepare cheap, healthy and delicious vegetable-based meals for their children.
At JES, the school administration and faculty have set aside a 200-square-meter plot for gardening, where students and their teachers grow local fruits and vegetables. The garden’s harvest were then used to prepare meals under the school’s feeding program.
As with the other schools involved in the project, JES uses bio-intensive gardening technique, to grow its plants. As I discussed in my previous column, bio-intensive gardening is an agroecological farming method that produces a variety of crops despite investing less inputs. This is why the garden has deep dug beds to keep the soil moist, has kakawate trees around the plot as their leaves are used as green manure and has an array of indigenous crops, including kamote, talinum, mustasa and melons as biodiversity reduces pest infestation and also encourages children to eat more vegetables. No chemical fertilizers or pesticides are used. One corner of the garden has a shelf that stores various seeds of cropss—ensuring that traditional varieties will continue to flourish in this soil.
The results, so far, are encouraging. The staff reported reduced incidence of hunger and malnutrition and has also increased the parents’ awareness on nutrition. Another positive impact is that more schoolchildren are now aware of agriculture as school gardens function as a learning lab. Gardening might encourage them to choose a career in agriculture in the future. This can be good news to the shrinking agriculture sector as the current generation of young workers are now leaving the farms for better job opportunities in the city.
A report prepared by IIRR’s Emilita Oro, DepEd’s Rizalino Jose T. Rosales and FNRI’s Imelda Angeles-Agdeppa revealed that under the first phase of Integrated School Nutrition project, which ran from 2012 to 2015 and only covered Cavite schools, supplementary feeding of malnourished schoolchildren using iron-fortified rice and indigenous vegetables from school gardens significantly improved their nutritional status. The schoolchildren’s parents are also more informed about gardening and nutrition while the school gardens remained productive, providing free supply of vegetables all year round. The second phase of the project (2015-2018), which expands beyond the province of Cavite, is expected to scale up the positive results noted in Phase 1.
The project of course is not without its set of challenges. As the report noted, the lack of designated staff to manage the feeding center affects school feeding program. Learning about agriculture is also not a priority among schools and there’s still a need for a simpler way of tracking and documenting outcomes of the project. But there are some key lessons learned, such as the need to integrate nutrition in the curriculum to sustain good eating habits; that school gardens can indeed help in conserving and reintroducing local varieties of legumes, green leafy vegetables, root and tuber crops; and that schools are effective platforms for integrated nutrition interventions.
Nigella Lawson once said in one of the episodes of Simply Nigella that one has to eat well in order to live well. I want to expound on the idea by saying that it doesn’t really cost much to have a life well-lived.
My own experience in gardening and the positive outcome of the Integrated School Nutrition project prove that one need not spend a lot of money in order to eat well. These local seeds are free (or can be had for a low price), and with a little bit of knowledge, gardening tools, water and sunlight, one can always use the backyard or some containers in the windowsill to grow tomatoes, herbs and the enduring gratitude for the opportunity to eat and live well.
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Prime Sarmiento is a longtime business journalist who specializes in food, agribusiness and commodities-trade reporting. Her stories have been published in both local and international publications, including Nikkei Asian Review, China Daily, Science and Development News Network and Dow Jones Newswires.
Comments and ideas are welcome at prime.sarmiento@gmail.com.