Author: Healing Present Nature & Wellness Center

Treetop Adventures

Featured by Healing Present Nature & Wellness Center, posted in Color Combo & Design, Food Garden, Gardening and Landscape Design, Raised Beds, School Gardens, Therapeutic Garden, wildlife garden

By Michelle Domocol @inflourish_

Back to Inflourish: Cebu

As a child, it felt magical to play in a treehouse, feel closer to the sky, and capture a bird’s eye view. I was overjoyed and curious. Treehouses and tree decks are some of the best settings for imaginative play, relaxation, and daily connection with nature. Today, I’ll share some fun ideas for gardens that enhance treehouses and tree decks. The inspiration can enrich a treehouse or deck in a backyard, community garden, or a local school. Feel free to incorporate these planting combinations into personal projects or share them with community members looking to improve a treetop design.

A treehouse adorned with a succulent greenroof above borders of floral shrubs, colorful foliage, and aromatic groundcovers.

Vibrant Foliage & Flowers. Planting floral and foliar color are beautiful ways attract interest and highlight your treetop structure. You can concentrate on particular color combination, motif, floral scent, or educational theme to help determine your plant palette. Or you can select plants based on particular height and space requirements. With this criteria, floral groundcovers, shrubs, and a few trees may suit your site. With cozier spaces, potted plants, epiphytes, and vines are preferable.

Or get creative! Add add a shallow raised bed of flowering succulents on the rooftop of your treehouse. Or add a succulent border or raised boxes on the perimeter of your tree deck. If your site is larger it space, add additional flowering fruit trees. And don’t forget colorful shrubs as an option. San franciscos (Codiaeum spp.), Mais-mais (Dracaena spp.), cordyline lilies (Cordyline spp.), and Mayana (Coleus spp.) pop with deep maroons, golds, hot pinks, and other rich hues. Remember to observe your site’s soil conditions and sun exposure to further refine your plant selection. Here are some vibrant floral exemplars that grow well in my area:

  • Waling Waling orchid (Vanda sanderiana)
  • Philippine ground orchid (Spathoglottis plicata)
  • Rose Mallow shrub (Hibiscus moscheutos)
  • Sampaguita shrub (Jasminum sambac)
  • Bird of Paradise (Strelitzia spp.)
  • Heliconia spp.
  • Torch ginger (Etlingera elatior)
  • Ylang Ylang tree (Cananga odorata)
  • Siar tree (Peltophorum pterocarpum)
  • Narra tree (Pterocarpus indicus)
  • Malapapaya tree (Polyscias nodosa)
  • Bani tree (Milletia pinnata)
  • Binunga tree (Macaranga tanarius)
A tree deck supported by an old Acacia surrounded by big-leafed, shade-loving plants and ferns. The Acacia is also adorned with vines and fern epiphytes.

Trees with Shade-loving accents. Adding trees with shade accents can also enrich your tree house or tree deck. In time, this combination will turn into a shady, cool respite from the heat. Your shade-loving accent can be big-leaved gabi, palmettos, Colocosia spp., monsteras, and ferns while the native trees can have sprawling crowns, graceful palm leaves, compact treetops, and/or seasonally produce fruit. Other tree species could be Alibangbang (Bauhinia malabarica), native bamboos, Panalipan (Diospyros tenuipes), and Maritima (Vatica maritima). Alternatively, you can focus on adding compact fruit trees or larger fruit trees like native figs like Dakit, Lagnob, and other Ficus spp. Other suitable fruit-bearing choices could be Banana varieties, Avocado, Nangka, and Balimbing.

A field of heliconias and birds of paradise with a background of fruit tree accents leading to a treehouse.

Trees that can support Houses or Decks. Most of this article focusses on enhancing an existing treehouse or deck with a surrounding garden. If you need advice for the right tree to support a new treehouse or tree deck, ask an engineer, experienced builder, or treehouse designer.

There many ways to build a treehouse. Sometimes the entire structure is attached to the tree. Others build structures with no weight on the tree. Additionally, builders incorporate gaps in the platform and roof so the tree can grow through the house and deck. In my experience, treehouses are made with healthy, mature, multi-trunked hardwood trees. In Cebu, old Fig trees, old Mango trees, mature Yakal, Ipil, Lawaan, Narra, and Acacia are used in tree decks or treehouse projects.

Have fun creating and enjoy your future treetop adventures!

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Forests Upwards & Outwards

Featured by Healing Present Nature & Wellness Center, posted in agroforestry, Food Garden, Gardening and Landscape Design, wildlife garden

By Michelle Domocol @inflourish_

Back to Inflourish: Cebu

Last June I took a break from posting an article and dedicated more time to managing new projects for Healing Present. The in-house construction and plant nursery staff are working hard to grow tree saplings and upgrade fences around our established forests and budding new agroforestry gardens.

I’d love to share some brainstorms for plant combinations for our upcoming forestry and garden plots. It’s incredibly essential to focus on Healing Present’s private reforestation but Cebu’s fragile environment needs the broader protection and resource enhancement of Mananga-Kotkot-Lusaran watershed forest reserves and public green spaces like CCPL (Central Cebu Protected Landscape).

Beyond Healing Presents current projects, I want to also share my personal aspirations for community-led watershed forest restoration through CCPL (Central Cebu Protected Landscape):

Support Existing Watershed Forests. On Healing Present’s existing forests’ creeks and natural pools by increasing biodiverse native canopy cover and understory. We will use techniques like assisted natural native plant regeneration, medium diversity planting, tree island nucleation, and coverage rows to increase cover in degraded riparian buffer areas. We would plant climate-adapted, typhoon-resistant canopy species (eg., Anisoptera thurifera, Parashorea malaanonan, Shorea malibato, Petersianthus quadrialatus), deep-rooted windbreaks and erosion control species (eg., Calophyllum inophyllum and Diospyros blancoi). If possible, we’d like to echo this action on a broader community-connected scale. In the future we’d like to join other organizations’ efforts to provide vegetation and technical support to local watershed forest reserves in the nearby CCPL. Increased canopy cover improves our watershed’s functionality and ecological services such as wildlife connectivity, riverbank stabilization, and freshwater recharge. Any effort to truly increase biodiverse the watersheds’ native canopy cover between forest fragments and other degraded areas of the watershed forest reserves would benefit the province and city of Cebu.

Support Existing Watershed Agroforestry training and implementation. In Healing Present, we promote and plant multistrata agroforesty designs for native forest restoration, our own consumption and health benefits. In the future, we’d like to provide support for existing agroforesty initiatives that are more around our nearby watershed. We’d also like to help existing reforestation projects plan crop cultivation schedules that ultimately lead to phases of forest restoration. Some combinations we’ve recommended around Balamban and properties include species that are :

  • high-value timber (e.g., Anacardiaceae and Caesalpiniaceae, Verbenaceae);
  • cash crop nut trees (e.g., Canarium ovatum);
  • high-demand fruit trees (e.g., Citrus spp. Mangifera altissima, Chrysophyllum cainito);
  • local fig tree species (e.g., Ficus nota);
  • nitrogen-fixing vegetation (e.g., Moringa oleifera);
  • perennial culinary and decorative (eg., Zingiberaceae).

We’d also like to join organizations in their efforts to provide training and resources for locally accessible agroforestry interventions and sustainable enterprises. CCPL, for example, would benefit from a strong and continued Successional Agroforestry Training Program. Trainees would learn suit market demands, community preferences, biophysical conditions, labor availability, affordability, and infrastructure. Options would be compatible with regionally practiced agroecological methods, low tillage, and climate-smart agricultural techniques. The multi-strata agroforests permitted in CCPL could be intercropped with native nitrogen-fixing vegetation, fast-growing nitrogen-fixing groundcovers, fodder species, and perennial crops in multiple-use zones, depending on the trainees’ site conditions and management goals.

Other suitable site designs, affordable crop management, buyer negotiations, product marketing, and commercialization would benefit the existing and new farmers in CCPL. Featured management techniques could include selecting multipurpose trees/shrubs that enrich soil and crop productivity (e.g., Leucaena spp.), contour vegetation strips, floral insectary hedgerows, living fences, windbreaks, and multistrata homegarden designs. The program will facilitate farmer-to-farmer exchange with existing homegarden and medium-scale systems. Some examples would focus on ginger-based agroforestry models, diverse taro systems combined with native shade trees (e.g., Dipterocarpaceae), climate-adapted crop varieties, and improved grafted varieties.

The targets on agroforestry and improved watershed management in CCPL enhance community-led engagement in watershed protection. Agroforestry-based production presents economically viable methods to simultaneously implement watershed restoration and generate income for communities of growers.

Support Native Bat Habitat. In Healing Present’s forests and CCPL I want to refine the focus on stabilizing resident keystone bat populations (e.g., Golden-capped Flying Fox, Large Flying-fox, and Little-Golden Mantled Flying Fox). Strong bat habitats supports the restoration of the watershed’s multiple ecosystems and their indigenous flora and faunal communities.  The protection of bat populations also sustains their role in watershed forest regeneration, commercial fruit pollination, and agricultural pest control through Cebu. If reforestation is successful, the aim is to increase native bat forested habitat connectivity between fragments of closed canopy, open canopy and other tropical rainforest patches

In Healing Present, we want to increase the amount of food and habitat trees preferred by Golden-capped Flying Fox, Large Flying-fox, and Little-Golden mantled flying fox (e.g., Ficus aurantiaca, F. variegata, F. crassiramea, Nauclea orientalis). In CCPL, if more bat habitat projects move forward, the sites for bat corridors and applied nucleation can connect areas of wooded grassland, shrubland, closed canopy forest, highly fragmented primary and secondary tropical rainforest patches, riparian forests, and ravine dipterocarp forest patches. 

I’m excited Healing Present continues to increase the vegetation in our forest fragments but they will weaken if nearby greenspaces and watersheds outside our private properties are unprotected, bulldozed, and covered in concrete. Hopefully effective community efforts can battle the unmitigated commercial development, sand and gravel extraction, solid waste pollution, agrichemical pollution, and unsustainable charcoal production on our precious Mananga-Kotkot-Lusaran watershed forest reserves in CCPL.

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Landscaping Local & Homegrown

Featured by Healing Present Nature & Wellness Center, posted in agroforestry, Color Combo & Design, Gardening and Landscape Design, wildlife garden

By Michelle Domocol @inflourish_

Back to Inflourish: Cebu

In today’s post, I’m celebrating landscapes–large and small–flourishing with native trees, shrubs, ferns, flowers, and grasses. Gardens that showcase the Philippines’ endemic and indigenous flora instill pride. I recently saw a presentation that emphasized Philippines has over 3000+ indigenous trees while all of Europe has only 454 native species. And boy do some European countries campaign for the protection and widespread use of their small pool of local trees. In Cebu, our own government buildings are adorned by the same typical palette of non-native foliage planted around local hotel chains.

The culture of undervaluing native species originates from a host of historical and economic reasons. One cause stems from a commercial plant industry that isn’t equipped to propagate many types of native species. Plus customers are unfamiliar (or assumed to be inexperienced) with native species’ maintenance needs and aesthetic.

But those trends can change. I hope we eventually invest in a horticultural industry and culture that celebrates, researches, and proliferates the protection and integration of endemic and indigenous flora in our personal gardens, commercial spaces, and public parks.

Here’s a fun design to inspire new garden combinations that feature endemic and indigenous flora.

In this design, the numbers represent the following types of plants: 1-Ficus species; 2-Nauclea orientalis; 3-Native and naturalized Bamboo species; 4, 5, 6, 8, 10- Groups of Native Shrubs; 7, 9, 11- Native Ferns

1- Ficus species. You can use local fig species like Ficus nota, Ficus variegata, and Ficus ulmifolia. These species are fast growing, attract beautiful birds, and fruit all year. Ficus nota and Ficus ulmifolia grow to 3 to 5 meters and shade smaller gardens during hot, sunny days. While Ficus variegata grows in full sun and rises to 25 meters.

2-Nauclea orientalis. Locally referred to as Hambabaw or Bangkal, these trees sprout distinctive spherical fruit. They are fast-growing, tolerate waterlogged soils, heavy winds, and produce beautiful blooms in full sun. They can reach 15 meters and their outstretched leafy branches offer cool air (like natural air-conditioning) and excellent shade.

3- Bamboo species. Native bamboo species from the Cyrtochloa, Dinochloa, Schizostachyum genera are great choices. When planted in groups they create natural screens and privacy from neighbors.

4, 5, 6, 8, 10- Shrubs. Borders with alternating sections of shrubs create bold accents. For example, grow 5 local blueberry shrubs in a group. Then next to that group grow a cluster of 5 Cratoxylum shrubs. Alternating clusters make more visual impact than a single row of different individual shrubs. Other shrubs you can plant are bignay species, lemongrass, and pay-at (Clerodendrum macrostegium, Clerodendrum brachyanthum, or Clerodendrum intermedium).

7, 9, 11- Native Ferns. Diplazium esculentum (edible fern) and Lygodium species (nito) are wonderful, hardy choices for combining groups of ferns.

I hope this design encourages you to discover more native flora in your local forests and plant nurseries. And if you already know about local indigenous and endemic flora, I hope you’re inspired to garden with native species and teach others about your knowledge of local trees, shrubs, and flowers. The above photos of plant features are from Co’s Digital Flora and Wikimedia commons. I highly recommend Co’s Digital Flora if you’d like to learn more and marvel at the abundance and diversity of native species around the Philippines.

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Year-Round Zesty Citrus Garden

Featured by Healing Present Nature & Wellness Center, posted in Color Combo & Design, Container Garden, Food Garden, Gardening and Landscape Design, Raised Beds

By Michelle Domocol

Back to Inflourish: Cebu

In a previous articles like, Bees and Belonging and Starter Citrus Garden, I’ve offered delicious fruit garden designs and fruit-growing instructions for your own manageable and convenient supply of juicy fruit.

In this post, I’ll present a new citrus design, from my ebook, Inflourish Cebu Kitchen Garden Designs, you can start in April. I’ll also share coconut husk fertilizer and vermicompost techniques we practice in the farm. They help us maintain citrus trees with minimal non-chemical fertilizer.

Zesty Citrus Garden. The Zesty Citrus Garden is full of beautiful, blooming citrus flavors for your favorite dishes, salads, desserts, dips sauces, and marinades. Buongon Salad, fresh Limonsito juice, and CocoLemon Yogurt are some of my favorite citrus treats. Fruit juice and zest from limonsito, biasong lemon, kumquat and pomelo also flavor party juices, teas, and tasty cocktails. For these recipes, check out the ebook or our other recipe books.

In the Zesty Citrus Garden, you’ll have a beautiful collection dwarf citrus trees –both native and naturalized species. These tasty trees not only flavor your meals, they also nurture essential pollinators like stingless bees and native butterflies.

In this design, the numbers represent the following fruitful plants: 1-Passionfruit; 2-Dwarf Tacunan Lubi; 3-Buongon; 4-Limonsito; 5-Biasong; 6-Lemon; 7-Makrut Lime, 8-Kumquat; 9-Dayap Lime; 10-Cabuyao

The outdoor bar and background mirror are framed with Passionfruit and Dwarf Tacunan Lubi. These two plants attract essential pollinators and help the other trees produce fruit. In-ground and potted Buongon, Limonsito, and Biasong form a fragrant citrus island backing a circular cushioned chair and ottoman. Behind a parallel set comfy outdoor seats is a gorgeous raised bed of more citrus trees like Lemon, Makrut Lime, Kumquat, Dayap Lime, and Cabuyao. Thankfully some of these citrus trees have grafted or dwarf varieties that can stay short and compact for convenient harvesting and smaller garden dimensions. Just look for plant nurseries that carry compact varieties if you have a cozy garden space.

Coconut Husk Fertilizer. Every few months, we check if our fruit trees need non-chemical fertilizer to help them grow fruits. If they do, after we’ve watered their soil, we add a 1/2 cup of liquid fertilizer. The coconut husk fertilizer is just a mix of coconut husk pieces and water. It sits and ferments for a few days before pouring it onto the fruit tree’s soil.

Vermicompost. We also have the option to add vermicompost and vermicompost tea to the soil. This could be added to the top of the soil or to the potting mix before a plant is placed in the ground or container. Browse through this slideshow of photos and excerpts of our farmer’s instruction manual to remind them of the DOs and DON’Ts for vermicomposting:

  • Vermicompost Earthworm 3-level apartment
  • Reminders in farmers’ manual
  • Foods for Vermi Worms
  • More Reminders to keep the Special earthworms thriving
  • Special vermicompost worms
  • Chopped Bani (Banana stem) for earthworm food
  • Comfy Dried leaves and torn cardboard for vermicompost bedding
  • Bedding and food added to the bottom of the Earth worm Apartment

Vermicompost comes from special earthworms that eat certain types of food. After they eat, they produce a beneficial manure that is nutritious for plants and non-toxic to humans. There are many different systems to house vermicompost worms. Our earthworm gardeners live in mini 3-level worm apartment made of 3 storage bins. This apartment keeps the earthworms alive & thriving, holds their food, and helps us extract beneficial manure and compost tea from the earthworms.

I hope this design and fruit production tips inspire to start your sweet, tangy citrus garden journey. Have a fruitful April.

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Healthy Starts to Homegardens

Featured by Healing Present Nature & Wellness Center, posted in agroforestry, Color Combo & Design, Food Garden, Gardening and Landscape Design, Herbs

By Michelle Domocol
Back to Inflourish: Cebu Blog

Homegarden agroforests are personalized, multi-functional gardens. When you grow your own homegarden, you can harvest from a mix of trees, shrubs, and vegetables that can grow well together and provide you with an affordable source of nutrition. 

You can create the homegarden that plays a multitude of roles: a supply of fresh vegetables, floral bouquets, fresh tea leaves, herbs for your favorite sauces, fruits, wood for construction projects, habitat for local butterflies, or a thick shrub/tree buffer to shield you from noisy neighbors and their loud dogs.

Depending on your design the homegarden can start out as circular groups of plants or linear rows. They can be as simple as two tree species like limonsito and kapayas planted in between your favorite vegetables like camote.

As you learn more about your growing site and try more cultivation techniques, you can add more species and create a more complex food forest. Homegardens can also have multipurpose trees, nut trees, medicinal herbs, groundcovers and fragrant butterfly-attracting shrubs.

A homegarden with popular perennials, annual vegetables, herbs, edible ferns, and fruit trees. Other possible choices are saluyot, kulitis, paliya, upo, okra, and kangkong.

In Healing Present, our homegardens feature perennials (plants that live longer than 2 years) and annual vegetables (several harvests and life cycles within a year). Some of my favorite multipurpose perennials are kamunggay, balimbing, and passionfruit. With balimbing and passionfruit, I add the leaves to my daily meals. When they bear fruit, I freeze them for my desserts. Kamunggay’s edible flowers, leaves, and pods are a treat. If you let them grow tall and mature, the provide shade for nearby plants. Passionfruit vines create a thick barrier of leaves on fences so you can have a visual and sound barrier from roads and neighbors.

To maintain the Healing Present’s trees, the talented staff gardeners apply coconut husk fertilizer the soil surrounding the fruits and shrubs. They also prune the fruit trees during certain times of the year to keep them productive. They also regularly add leaf and woodchip mulch around young seedlings. There are other daily and monthly practices to maintain the homegardens but Fertilizing, Pruning, and Mulching are key.

Adding Coconut Husk -based (Bunot) Fertilizer around Fruits and shrubs
Pruning Fruit Trees
Mulching around young trees, vegetables and shrubs

Interested in starting your own homegarden? Here are some tips to get you designing your personal food forest:

  1. Plan & Learn. Ask yourself what plants you find useful or interesting. Plants can fulfill many uses like food, beauty, fragrance, floral decor, songbird attraction, privacy hedge, windbreaks, and more. Brainstorm a garden design with potential vegetables or fruit trees that are easy to grow in your site. Or if you already have some plant knowledge, focus on crops you may know how to grow. Visit plant nurseries and purchase seedlings or tree saplings so you don’t have to start every plant from seed. Be inquisitive. Learn from local farmers, plant nursery staff, local garden clubs, city agriculture programs, university horticultural departments, local plant workshops, online gardening communities, garden design magazines, or online courses. Feel free to explore the following articles or click on the links below this article for more ideas: Terrific AgroforesTrees, A for Agroforestry, Kamunggay, March’s Featured Crop, March: Food x Flower Gardens
  2. Perennial progress. Ask a local nursery or farmer about perennial vegetables, mushrooms, fruits, and herbs that require a low amount of inputs (like fertilizer and pesticide). This means they are long-living, well-adapted, and less likely to give you pest or slow growth problems. It will be even better if you find these perennials fit your needs and preferences.
  3. Groundcovers and mulching. Learn what groundcovers and mulch options are available to you. Growing groundcovers (like mani-mani or ferns) and/or placing mulch (from rice hulls, fallen leaves, or fallen branches) around your young plants reduce the amount of space for weeds to take over your new garden. Over time, as your garden matures, the trees’ roots and overhanging leaves will shade out spaces in garden and reduce weed growth.
  4. Start Small. Don’t be overwhelmed by designing a large space. If possible start by converting a small space. Then, as your skills improve, venture outward and expand the homegarden with simple or more complex combinations of plants.

Enjoy the rest of March! See you in April with dessert recipes, simple fertilizer recipes, and more.

Feel free to contact ask.inflourish@gmail.com for design or gardening questions.

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