Balinghasai Farms

In 2008, a modest 3.4 hectare woodland property located near the foothills of the Sierra Madre mountains in Bulacan was offered to me for sale. The property was densely populated with wild trees like Binayuyu, Alibangbang, Ligas, Kalios among others and was thickly overran by weeds, primarily Cogon and Talahib. Immediately, I thought of how much work and time it needs to make the place habitable and, more over, how much money I will need to buy the property and start a dream farm project. Despite the impending big headache, I still got excited! It must be my love for farming, my appreciation for nature and my strong inclination for conservation that made me threw all cautions to the wind and bravely staked all I have to own this no man’s land…. in installments, of course!

By 2009, we are already securing the whole lot with bamboo fence (which we replaced gradually with concrete posts), building a simple wooden homestead for my overseer with an adjoining reception hut for visitors and setting up a deep-well for potable water source. We also painstakingly took out most of the redundant wild trees and stumps left by wood poachers but retained the ones that shade the natural creek and those that needed identification. The cleared space rendered for crops like carabao mangoes, coconuts, papayas and seasonal vegetables but it must be the soil or the general climate in the area that made the coconut ambition unsuccessful. One by one, the coconuts wilted and died despite our efforts to keep them. Lesson learned!
What’s left of the planting space, most notably on the sides aligned to the fence, along the creek bank and the pathways, gave way to various native forest trees seedlings that were either given to me or traded for by fellow advocates in conservation or sourced from the Manila Seedling Bank and Hortica Filipina Foundation. Friends from the Rarefruit Society of the Philippines also generously shared their planting materials.

In the early years, we called this “Cocomangas Farm”; readers from my web journal (www.indi-journal.info) might have possibly read about it. Last year, when I registered the business with DTI, I was stuck in a dilemma of jotting down the old name or renaming it with a more suitable one. Finally, I decided to name it after a native tree that is prolific along the wooded creek bank of the property, hence the curious name. (3094)