DAY 54: Community Quarantine

    SARI-SARI STORES- Yesterday two covid task force volunteers announced that all sari-sari store in Taytay will be closed as ordered by the LGU authorities. 

   There have been FB posts about this a couple of days ago, and retractions too, because there were conflicting orders from the new police chief and the barangay captains and some members of the Sanggunian. I guess the police and the municipal authorities got their act together and are now in synch.

   But as always with many Filipinos, rules are obeyed when there is someone to enforce it.

  The sari-sari stores here are in a state of quantum superposition, they are both close and open. The superposition only collapses into either one of the two states when there is an interaction with the customer.

   I don't know, every time there is an extension of the ECQthere are additional restrictions which should have been placed in the first place, at the onset of the pandemic. The noose should been very tight from the very start and not progressive as what is happening. 

    PET SEMATARY- I released Jaya from her leash and the first thing she did was to check on Koko's cage. 

   She was not excited to see me this morning, no barking, no jumping, no tail wagging. I guess she misses her mate.

    It took me three hours to dig up Koko's grave yesterday.  It's back breaking labor since our yard has been land-filled with construction (or deconstruction is more apt) materials mostly composed of rocks and broken concrete materials. My arm went numb from barreling and shoveling rocks.

    Because of the heat combined with the fatigue, I had difficulty sleeping last night. I think it must have been past three when the lights went out. I woke up with a slight head ache.

    CASTRATING PAPAYA- I have some papaya trees around the house and one of them is a male, not fruit bearing. I have learned that papayas have three sexes, male, female, and the hermaphrodite. 

   The sexes can only be indetified once the flowers come out. I am curious how can the three sexes be identified at an early stage so that I can choose which to plant. 

   My research led mo to a video on how to castrate papaya to prevent it from becoming a male tree.

   The process is simple, cut the main root of the papaya saplings. Replant it to a temporary planter, put in a place away from the sun and wait for it to recover, then transplant.

  ALUGBATI- I have put treliss for the alugbati. Since I am eating it fresh, I avoided picking leaves that touches the ground that might be contaminated with nematodes larva.

   But I observed that it is near the ground where the healthiest and crunchiest leaves are produced. So, to encourage the energy and nutrients to go up to the climbing stems and leaves, I defoliated the base of the plant.

DAY 51: Community Quarantine

   PAPAYA- One of my papayas now has fruits. Judging from the flowers, this is hermaphrodite tree. Good thing because it's self pollinating.

   I thought the fruit would not develop because the young buds looked yellowish and a bit dehydrated a few days ago. I am hoping it will ripen. 

   I have read suggestions from an FB gardening group that killing the first fruits would encourage the tree to produce better fruits the next time. I don't know if theres any scientific basis for this, but sounds like voodoo to me.

   The other tree is starting to produce flowers and from the looks of it, it looks like a male tree. It will not produce fruits. I am thinking of cutting it down because it would occupy precious space. I also have a hermaphrodite tree to pollinate the other trees so I don't see the need.

  There are suggestions that severe pruning of the tree can cause it to change its sex from male to female. This was tried by my sister and it did not work, or maybe it takes more than one pruning.

   Male papayas are planted in large plantations but in small gardens, they took up space and are useless.

    RICE HULL- My "bilas" harvested rice and I asked for rice hulls for my plants. I am thankful that I got two sacks. 

   Cainta used to have rice mills along Bonifacio Avenue.  My father used to collect rice hulls for free. It was dumped at the back of the mills and we just carry sacks and take as much as we wanted. The rice hull was used by my father for charcoal making.

   I was often warned by my father to be careful because rice hulls float and I may step on a deep hole and drown, a quicksand.

  The rice mills are now gone and in its place stood residential and commercial buildings. There are no more areable land in Cainta and I think my bilas' rice field is the last one and parts of it are already converted to a residential subdivision and a public cemetery.

  RAISED BED- I am making another raised garden bed. I have already made one a couple years back but it got buried when I land-filled the lot with construction debris.

  I have so many plants as it and I don't know if I could handle more since most of my mornings are occupied by watering, pruning, and removing weeds. 

   But I have to do more because once I have empty time, my mind wanders off.

   Also, busyness keeps me away from thinking about food, which is really the most powerful temptation since I usually give in.

Tomatoes and thoughts on decompressing

Gardening for me is the best anti stress activity.

Firstly, it's cheap. The materials are easily available and there are few things to buy except maybe for the seeds or a sack of organic soil as additive to regular soil, this optional of course. Regular soil is OK as long as it is cultivated properly. 

You don't even need a lot of space. Urban gardening, if done properly, can accommodate a lot of plants in small spaces.

The beginning has started.

Secondly, it gives back. Drinking, partying, or eating out cost money.  I am not saying these things are bad, occasionally they are good but done regularly, the accumulated cost would be significant especially for income earners. 

On the other hand, gardens provides food on the table, and even ornamental plant gardening gives a lot in return, clean air, beautiful surroundings, water retention, etc. 

I am now re-starting my urban garden since the rainy season has ended. I have been bringing home  empty water bottles 

brought to the school by pupils for the school's recycling campaign. I have planted in them with tomatoes, okras (lady fingers),  basil, eggplant, and string beans. 

 Thirdly,  the activity diverts the mind from anxieties real or imagined. Most of the times, I am so focused on what I am doing from snipping off unnecessary branches from a bonsai tree to removing weeds from a pot that I could feel my mind uncluttered. 

Of course, this is an unconscious effect of letting the hand and mind work together because once I think that I am doing this to fight off stress, it becomes an effort. 

Okras and tomatoes. These are staples. Last year I have planted them into the ground but since space is  and sunlight is becoming scarce due to competition, I have decided to plant them on recycled bottle so that I could move them once in while where there's more sunlight.They need at least six hours of direct sunlight.

I guess this where the eastern philosopher Lao Tzu got it right when he said that "to the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders" or "usefulness of a pot comes from its emptiness." 

Our life is cluttered with busyness, with work, with the desire to be the best, to be ahead. But at what cost? Disconnection. People are disconnected with their inner self. Too occupied with impressing other people, with ambition, that they miss other human experiences.

Eggplants and basil seedlings. The basil was given to me by my sister from Baguio and I don't know anything about basil except what I have read about it. This is my first time growing them.

We believe that having and doing more is the solution to the choking clutter of anxieties.

Gardening stuffs

I'm still not done cleaning our garden. I cut the grass using garden scissor which is time consuming and laborious. But the repetetive action, the smell of cut grass and Wes Montgomery's guitar in the background made the task relaxing. I guess it's the feeling of being intune with nature.

Now my feet and legs are itching. I guess that's why it's important to wear proper clothes when gardening like long pants. rubber boots, gloves etc. But in this summer heat... Anyway, the culprit is this weed. I don't know what this is called in English but locally we call this "lipang aso". A contact with the leaves produces itch and irritation comparable to and bite. Before I knew about this plant, I always thought that I was bitten by ants or other insects until my mother told me about lipang aso.She had this childhood story about naughty boys rubbing lipang aso leaves to girls' panties that are drying on clothesline.

The eggplants are already producing fruits and maybe in a week or two the rest of them will also be fruiting. I was hesitant about planting eggplants because I have rheunatism, knee and ankle gout to be specific. I have had excruciating flare ups and the culprit are foods with high uric acid contents. Eggplants, because it contains little seeds which is almost impossible to separate, is considered a high risk food. But many vegetable contain seed like string beans, gourds, okra, peas, etc. I mean, if I avoid all these vegetables I may end up undernourished or worse I could starve. Anyway, vegetables do not contain that much uric acid and according to what I have read the body can easily process and eject or flush out uric acid from vegetables and what is really bad is uric acid from animal innards.

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Yellow Bitter Gourd and Bonsai etc...

I don't know if it can be called a garden, forest or jungle is more appropriate. My bonsai materials are being outrun by weeds and maybe after I'll work on them later.

Anyway, I did some cleaning in our garden, pulled out weeds and swept the yard, a task that took me the whole morning and still I'm not yet done. The sun is already at its peak and the heat is unbearable.

I'll take a rest and continue maybe at three or four in the afternoon.


Even my bittergourd is affected by the el nino phenomenon. The extreme heat of the sun caused this young fruit to turn ripe prematurely. It has not been even reached it's teen age years (imagining the'yre human beings). I was waiting to harvest it for cooking sauteed bittergourd or ginisa but it grew old too fast.

Bitter gourd or ampalaya is good for the health. The Department of Health did studies on it and officially listed it as a bonafide medicinal plant that is good for fighting high blood pressure, diabetes and other diseases.

I have noticed that healthy food usually taste awful and most of the times are bitter, take for example serpentina a weed that has been traditionally used by asians to cure number of diseases. The leaves of serpentina is so bitter that boiling two or three pieces of its small leaves in a liter of water makes the resulting tea almost undrinkable. I guess that's why they call it "king of bitter" in English.

If bitter food is good for us, why is it that evolution or the creator did not program our taste buds to like them. I mean, instead of having sweet tooth, why not have bitter tooth. Why do we not have this uncontrollable urge to eat bitter foods especially when we feel down or depressed instead of diving in and devouring fatty and salty junk foods and consuming tons of chocolates and gallons of sodas, beer, ice tea etc.

Maybe it's because the change in our diet in the last century kind of reprogram our sense of taste. This is evident by the proliferation of candies and sweets. Sugar was once a rarity because of the difficuly of processing it from plants. In fact the ancients used honey as a sweetener but becuase of the invention of manufacturing and processing plants sugar became common, so common that it became one of the most common food ingredients.

I saw a documentary about the aetas and they have this natural knowledge of medicianl plants in their environment. They have specific plants for specific ailments and diseases that are proven effective that even the US military trained their special forces with the aetas on jungle survival. These herbological knowledge of the aetas is inculcated in them through thousand of years of adaptation to their environment.

I guess we all have these natural and instinctual herbological knowledge. Sometimes it's obvious like the lagundi which is good for cough, crush the leaves and you'll notice it's minty smell and taste. Even animals know what plants are good for them and they eat them instinctively.

I guess we, the modern humans, lost this innate knowledge when our sense of taste evolve into the mst based,  sweet, fatty, greasy, salty  etc. orientation that it now has.



I got addicted to bonsai that to came to a point where almost all the space in the yard was occupied by bonsai materials. Bonsais are beautiful to look at, they are great works of art specially if you see them in exhibitions. But before they become works of art, they are nothing but stumps. It takes years to grow branches and more years to train and wire them. This is why many bonsai hobbyists keep and train many bonsais to keep impatience in check.

Anyway, I stopped acquiring materials because I'm starting to get overwhelmed.



Looking at my growing bonsai material collection, a friend asked me what they are good at. I was tempted to engage him with a lecture on the art and the philosophy of bonsai but his question hit me: ge's right. I am not rich and my salary as a teacher is barely enough for our budget. My friend suggested I plant vegetables instead. To tell the truth his suggestion was good and utilitarian. I looked around the yard and then moved my bonsai materials to the edges of the lot so as not to occupy too much space and I started to plant vegetables.

Anyway...
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