Caba PH – DET family visit – 15 Feb 2013

The DET family live in the mountains in a small house made of light bamboo with no piped water or electricity, and they collect rainwater for laundry and flushing the toilet.

The mother and father have three girls and two boys living with them.  Their eldest 15 year old daughter is a high school undergraduate who has left school, and their 12 year old son is in grade 7 and likes to help his parents.  He helps his mother to prepare his younger siblings for school and tidy their common sleeping room.  Their 7 year old daughter is in grade 1 and is very shy, and their 4 year old youngest daughter goes to day care.

The family now have a vegetable garden, but before they started it the children often went to school with their stomachs only filled with a glass of water when they did not have any steamed rice to start their long day.  A day that started with a tiring uphill walk to school, which was harder during rainy seasons when the fields became muddy.

The family learned from a neighbor about how the Happy Shine shop was helping families start organic vegetable gardens.  This program, which helps all the family achieve food self-reliance, replaced the Breakfast Program that had been helping the malnourished children from impoverished families by giving them a free breakfast every school day.

Mrs. DET approached their neighbor, who had been the local coordinator for the Breakfast Program, and expressed her interest in being a part of the new Garden Program.  She began to have hope that this will be their chance to improve their life by being able to bring in more income, and give enough food to their children who had been going to school with empty stomachs most of the time.

The Happy Shine Garden Shop agreed to help and provided the family with a watering can, sprayer, rake, spading fork, shovel, plastic cover for compost, plastic water container, EM1, Molasses, Compost, and the organic garden manual. The Seed and Seedlings provided were String beans, Bell Pepper, Okra, Patola, Chilli, Bitter Gourd, Upo, and Squash. The following show the Happy Shine Garden Shop team helping the T family build their garden.

The family combined their local knowledge of farming, with the training and help from the Happy Shine Garden Mentor team.  The generally fair weather meant the seedlings they planted grew well.

They have taken good care of their garden and produced very good vegetable yields.  They are enjoying growing ampalaya, pechay, string beans, okra, green chili, tomato and eggplant.

They no longer purchase fertilizers because instead they make compost to nurture the land and plants.  The shop team also taught the family how to use kitchen waste to make a fermented fruit pesticide. The tools, spading forks and rakes make it easier for them to cultivate the soil.  The watering cans and drums for water storage make it possible to sustain the needs of the vegetable garden during the dry season.

The Mongo beans, which are good for putting nitrogen back into the soil, are ready for replanting, and the compost is ready for mixing into the soil.  They have not experienced any major issues, and the bitter gourd and Mongo beans, pictured below, are plentiful.

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