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