Maximizing space: a government officer turned his rooftop into a mini-farm
A government worker and weekend gardener from Tacloban turned his rooftop into a lush mini farm after renovating his house after it was affected by superyphoon Yolanda. Here, he plants and harvests vegetables and also maintains a chicken coop and a tilapia pond, all within a 118 square meter area.
AN EMPTY ROOFTOP is something that gardeners see as an opportunity to turn into a productive green space.
An example of this is the rooftop garden of Ricardo C. Gio, the Municipal Local Government Operations Officer of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) Leyte.
He was able to establish a vegetable garden, mini pond, as well as native chicken raising area in his 118 square meter wide rooftop on the third floor of his house in Tacloban City.
Gio loved planting ever since he was a kid and learned gardening all by himself through reading books and watching online videos. He has been doing container gardening since 1999. He started his rooftop garden in 2014, after the renovation of his house that was affected by Super Typhoon Yolanda.
Despite having a full time job, he still allotts time for gardening. He goes up to
his garden at five o’clock up to six o’clock in the morning and returns from five until seven o’clock in the evening. On weekends, he usually spends long hours in the garden.
Through gardening, Gio said that he is able to advocate for food security. He takes advantage of the internet to reach a wider audience in promoting this and aims to influence others in growing their own food regardless of status. He believes that it can also save poor communities from hunger and malnutrition.
In his family, both young and old members enjoy gardening as a hobby. Each of them has tasks in maintaining their garden that involves weeding, soil cultivation, watering, and maintenance of the mini pond and the small poultry area.
CONTAINER GARDENING
Gio began growing food in a raised bed. Presently, he produces different varieties in his vegetable garden such as tomato, eggplant, pechay, chili pepper, sweet potato, cassava, bitter gourd, malunggay, mulberry, basil, mint, lemongrass, cucumber, cranberry, string beans, turmeric, ginger, dragon fruit, and more.
For beginners, Gio suggests growing low-maintenance crops like camote, pechay, tomato, and pepper as these are easy to propagate.
He uses carbonized rice hulls mixed with compost soil and vermicast for his planting medium, while his seeds come from kitchen scraps, stores, and his friends.
When it comes to containers, there are plastic vases available in stores but some are pricey, Gio said. As an alternative, any improvised containers are great as long as the container’s thickness is appropriate to the plant you will be growing. Gio uses styrofoam boxes (used to store grapes in the market) to grow pechay, onion, and upland kangkong. Crops like eggplants, tomatoes, and peppers must be planted in at least one-foot-deep containers.
Gio avoids fertilizers that are harmful to the environment, so he makes his own natural fertilizer. He creates this by composting weeds, withered leaves, branches, stems, and non-oily kitchen leftovers.
Aside from the economic benefits of gardening, this also serves as a stress reliever for Gio. This does not just contribute to the conservation of the environment but it allows him to provide clean and quality vegetables for his family.
The major challenge in his garden is the birds that eat the seedlings and young plants. To solve this, he covers young plants with plastic containers until they grow broad leaves.
According to Gio, before you start planting, make sure to have time for gardening; an hour in the morning and two hours in the afternoon will do. Start with easy-to-propagate crops while considering the space that you have. And if available, use the seeds from vegetables and spices from your kitchen, dry them, and set them aside for germination to become seedlings. Lastly, raise your plants naturally for safer and healthier produce that is equally important to the environment as well.
SMALL TILAPIA POND
In his mini pond, he does not just raise cultured tilapia but this also comes handy to his vegetable crops.
The water from the pond is rich in urea and nitrogen that are necessary for plant growth hence, Gio fetches the pond water every day and pours them on his vegetable crops.
Over 200 tilapias are raised in his improvised pond made of coco lumber and plywood. He covered it with a plastic tarpaulin that fits the wooden structure and filled it with water. He also set up a water level drain to avoid spillage when it rains. The pond is refilled with water as needed.
He did not want to build a hydroponic setup as it uses electricity and will only benefit selected containers where the system is constructed. He sees the pond as more practical because it is possible to maintain without the use of electricity, plus the pond water can be divided and distributed to all containers in the garden, he said.
For small spaces, tilapia can also be raised in big plastic containers that are food-grade, Gio added.
Aside from the pond, he raises native chickens that are fed with different kinds of chicken feed, including vegetable leaves fresh from their garden.
Chickens with signs of colds and disease are provided with either malunggay or lemongrass juice that is rich in Vitamin C. These are also said to have antiseptic properties that are good for sick chickens.
Gio said that the only challenge for poultry raising is the bad odor that it emits. In order to lessen the bad smell, the chicken manure is mixed into the carbonized rice hull that will deodorize the chicken coops.
Raising chickens lessens the family’s food costs as it provides them with safe poultry meat. They currently have four full-grown hens and a rooster that have reproduced 25 chicks of various sizes.
Everything that they produce on their rooftop garden is for their own consumption. For excess supply, they either sell them to their peers and neighbors or share them for free.
They also use the chicken dung mixed with burnt rice hull as fertilizer. This way, nothing is wasted and everything benefits from each other. In his garden, crop production and animal raising are not built for their own purposes but it is a cycle that connects them all together, making his rooftop garden achieve its full productivity.
Insights and photos from Ricardo Cagara Gio.