Caba PH – SO Family garden – 14 Feb 2013

The SO family live in the highlands approximately 2 kilometers from the coastal town of Caba town. Their home’s walls are made of bamboo wood, roofing is recycled and rusty galvanized iron that has holes in it, and the dirt floor is the local clay. During rainy season the family, their belongings and the dirt floor get wet.

Mr SO is a tenant farmer who plants rice and corn depending on the season. He also grows vegetables like string beans, okra and eggplant to earn additional income.

The family has 3 children. The eldest is R who is 16 years old. She has finished high school and is now working as a housekeeper in the nearby City of San Fernando, half an hour’s bus ride north of the local town called Caba. Their son G is 12 years old and in the first year of high school, while their youngest R is 11 years old and in 5th Grade.

Mrs SO first learned about the Food Always In The Home (FAITH) Garden during one of the mentoring visits by the Happy Shine Garden Shop team in their neighborhood in 2012. She decided to participate because she learned that FAITH gardeners would be provided with the tools, support and mentoring in order for the family to succeed with the garden.  This inspired her and she thought that perhaps the garden could help her family with day to day expenses and enable them to start saving.

Jun and Leo of the garden shop visited seven families this week, in La Union Province of the Philippines island of Luzon, to see how they could help them with any issues and opportunities to improve.  The SO family was full of good news about the squashes that they have grown in their garden.

They could not think of any problems, and have been enjoying good production of vegetables like tomato, eggplant, pechay, green chili, squash and string beans.  They showed Jun and Leo the new batch of compost that they have been making, it looks like compost has fed the squash plants very well!