“Sweet-sour” me

IAM a sweet person, I pay dearly for it. Well, it is my personal journey in life. In my quest for the sweet things, I planted my parent’s backyard in Paco, Mankayan, Benguet into a small citrus orchard in the mid1990s that thrived well for more than two decades.

The sweet budded citrus plants have grown to a height of almost 6-10 feet tall. After planting, we started harvesting their fruits at four years old.

If you crave for sweet and juicy oranges, you need to study your trees, the soil, and orientation of your orchard. Your personality can help determine the character of your orchard too.

Citrus need the right amount of sun and nutrition to bloom and grow their fruit. In which case, plant your trees where they have much sunlight, at least 8 hours, and provide additional resources for the plants to bloom and bear fruit.

I use to go home to Mankayan during the summer to check on the citrus trees and tell my folks what to do to encourage the orange trees to produce sweet and juicy fruits. During those summer months, we sustained a regular weekly irrigation for the trees. When the rains do not come during blooming and fruiting, the trees will need more water to drink to produce bigger and juicier fruit.

To increase the nutrition of the trees, my parents fertilized the soil with compost from pig manure. Green manure is regularly applied to the soil since the trees are intercropped with camote and other plants that need to be fertilized this way. A dose of fruit fertilizer was applied around the trunk of the trees once a year.

I would like to think that the composted pig manure that we use to fertilize the trees and the wood ashes from the dirty kitchen gave enough phosphorous and potassium fertilizer for our citrus trees. They have been bearing enough juicy fruit every season for the clan. Some are sweet, a few others are sweet-sour. I like the latter. It is citrusy, what an orange should be.

The orchard is gone now long after my father died and my mother no longer had the strength to do chores besides attending to her grandchildren. My brothers and sisters are not interested in the sweet things.

Another hobby I pursued as a sweet guy is a beekeeping. I crave honey-sweetened coffee and I would savor and devour it the way I do with “etag and beans” in the yesteryears of this existence. But I cannot drink much-honeyed coffee now much more if it is sweetened with cane sugar. It makes my blood pressure and sugar rise and blurs my vision.

More than anything else, besides harvesting honey, beekeeping made me a keen student of nature. With beekeeping, I studied the plants and their behavior. I know what plants yield nectar what time of the day.

In those days, in the field, a beekeeper learns about what animals eat in the food chain. I became interested about this when I saw how a dozen Swift, black colored, fast flying, and diving birds, feasted on our swarming bee colonies on a hot day. Among the bee kind, some of them like the wasp hunt, kill and bring home honey bees to their hives.

I also stopped beekeeping after 80 of my bee colonies were destroyed by a strong typhoon while I was on official travel for a week in the boondocks. Notwithstanding this, I know beekeeping can yet become an alternative livelihood for our farmers in the Cordillera.

I struggle with my movements now like an old car and I continue to crave for the sweet things in life.

Like any mountain guy, I eat camote even if I never liked camote when cooked in its fresh state. I use to argue with my grandma, I cannot eat it. But when he cooks a potful of “kimpit,” camote that has sweetened during storage, she relished how I take to it like a bee does with the nectar of flowers.

The sweet life is for the young but in old age, you communicate your sweetness in other ways, even if you struggle against your irritations because of the shooting pain in the joints and nerves. But a sweet person must remain sweet, not sour, so I pray dear God, make me your “kimpit,” keep me sweet and kind, even if I should be shooting them down instead.

To be really sweet I added to this prayer that God will vanquish all evil thoughts in my mind to hades.