Beat rising prices of veggies thru urban gardening
FOR THOSE RESIDING in urban areas like Metro Manila who would like to have their own gardens but don’t have the land or space to plant vegetables, urban gardening is the answer.
This is one of the solutions in bringing and conducting agriculture in the urban setting.
For Mer Layson, this is possible with the use of discarded bottles or containers, right attitude, and strong will.
In doing so, one can have a ready supply of fresh vegetables, at the same time, beat the everincreasing prices of vegetables in the market, aside from having a source of healthy food for their families. For some, this idea could be unbelievable, but in other areas and in some cities of the country, this concept has been proven to flourish even in any available space, like windows, terraces, or in the very limited space of an apartment or highrise condominium building.
According to Layson, who has been practicing urban gardening by utilizing the grills of his rented apartment building in Manila, all you need are discarded plastic bottles cut in halves, pierced with small holes on the side, and filled with a small amount of soil, and presto! You now have the containers to plant different varieties of green leafy vegetables.
For his handmade receptacles which he calls the “self-watering plant containers,” Layson was able to plant, and eventually harvest easy-to-grow leafy vegetables like lettuce, mustard, pechay, including chilli pepper and the panigang variety of pepper.
To maintain the quality of his yields, Layson says he sources the vegetable seeds from Allied Botanical Corporation (ABC), particularly the Condor brand.
With the use of his improvised containers, the burden of watering the plants everyday will be eliminated.
Watering could only be done when water level in the containers becomes almost dry.
Layson says you can use any size of discarded plastic bottles, depending of course to the variety of vegetable which you may want to cultivate.
For the different varieties of lettuce like Condor’s Red Wave Lettuce, Layson only uses the 330 milliliter plastic bottles, but for the taller varieties like the Montana Mustard and the Black Behi White Stem Pechay, he uses the 1-liter or 1.5-liter