The Road To Simplicity This blog is about our transition from city life to a simpler life

Planning the farm

One major step done. We got land. It's small compared to other farmlands, i know, but it's a start.  I guess I need to backtrack a little bit to discuss the planning stage of the farm. You might have the impression that there was no planning done and we were just two people diving into totally unchartered waters. Hopefully we did enough research and planning before we took the plunge.  Here's some of the things we did:

1.  Surf! I mean, online, of course. Almost everything you need to know is right there in any type of format:  video, text, or both.

2. Another thing we did was  join an online group of farming enthusiasts.  This was a really  good move because we learned a lot about indigenous plants in the Philippines and more importantly,  about the local farming scene.  We also learned about their success stories, what sort of strategies they used to keep $$$ coming in. This is the most important thing to consider. You can't just wait for your fruit trees to bear and have nothing coming in. Another thing we gained from joining the group was contacts. We easily get the info that we need and know where to get them.

3. Aside from the online information, we also asked for materials from local farmers.

What were the things we looked for?

Plants/Fruit Trees - Basic question is what are we going to plant? From what we know of the local area (Dalaguete) , anything can grow.  It's not called the summer capital and vegetable basket of cebu for nothing.  I have to say that since I love mangoes so much,  this is a natural choice. I didn't know before all these, that there are lots of varieties of this fruit. After  considering different things like taste,  root stock, pest resistance, weight, profitability, we chose the Thai varieties:  Nam Doc Mai and Chokanan.  We also chose to plant another fruit Longkong which is a Thai variety of Lanzones. Currently, this is a high-value fruit in the Philippine market. Lastly, we also chose Tomboy calamansi which is a citrus fruit that can bear fruit in a year's time.

Fertilizers - There's a lot to choose from but we opted for all-natural fertilizers like vermicast (worm poop) , compost tea,  and  Mycovam which is a combination of  mycorrhizal (VAM) fungi  and spores etc.

Irrigation - We chose to have a drip irrigation system. With the mapping of all the plants, we asked help from DripWorks systems and they agreed to design the drip irrigation system for FREE. Isn't that nice? They'll provide you a list of all the things needed. You can get the drip, hole punch, hose, faucet in Lowe's or Home Depot if you want. You can also find free brochures at these stores but I find that they're insufficient if you want to design a dripping system for a farm.

Plant Mapping - To maximize the land, we searched for the best way to plant the combination of plants that we want. You wouldn't believe how many times we mapped and remapped to get everything right.

Pest Control - We really don't want to use chemicals on our trees so we searched for a low-cost all-natural repellant, HOC. From the online group, we found the answer and they were so nice that they even gave the recipe how to make them. The trick that makes HOC low-cost is that it uses locally grown plants.

Next blog, more details on the why and how's of each decision we made. Stay tuned.