The season of the shiny berries

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Mar 162013
 

The past few weeks have been very busy for me and Pim with all the doctor’s visits required of her 7th month of carrying, updating public records, acquiring necessary documents and filing her immigrant visa application that we never had much time to visit the farm except to make short stops to check the work done. With a baby coming along I miss the times when I spent most of my free time making the rounds at the farm and sometimes, when I’m feeling more adventurous, even going out far into the open grassland and woodlands beyond our fence; not even deterred by the sun’s heat or occasional rains.

Yesterday gave me free time so Val, my farm overseer, and I walked to check the partially shaded trees we’ve planted the past years along the shallow creek that borders the farm. We don’t usually collect fruits during the first quarter of the year because most trees we observe are not in fruit this season. It slipped my mind though that one particular cauliflorous and water-loving tree displays its magenta to deep-purple berries from January to March. And so there they were, ready for the picking! We have about a dozen of this wild trees scattered along the same natural waterway.

Val helped himself in sampling this season’s harvest; the shiny berries are sweet but they leave a little astringency on the tongue; truly a forest fruit! (186)

RFSP fruit tree planting in Biak na Bato and collecting wild fruits with Dr. Coronel

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Aug 042012
 

Last May 26, me, my wife and with few other enterprising members of the Rarefruit Society of the Philippines (RFSP) made a contribution to the greening of Biak na Bato National Park by planting Philippine native fruit trees. This project was initiated in the RFSP online forum upon the suggestion of Dr. Roberto Coronel; renowned fruit expert and highly esteemed professor emeritus at the University of the Philippines in Los Banos. With prior coordination in CENRO San Rafael, we have been allotted with a strip of freshly weeded planting area at the bank of the river that runs through the park. The sun was high and the humidity truly oppressing but we managed to put on happy faces as we plant Bignay (Antidesma ghaesembilla), Bunog (Garcinia benthami), Basiad (Canarium luzonicum), Alupag (Litchi chinensis ssp. philippinensis), Kamagong (Diospyros blancoi), Hunggo (Elaeocarpus cumingii), Bignay-pugo (Antidesma pentandrum), Paho (Mangifera altissima), Pili (Canarium ovatum), Balobo (Diplodiscus paniculatus), Ligas (Semecarpus cuneiformis), Amugis (Koordersiodendron pinnatum), Binukaw (Garcinia binucao), Kalumpit (Terminalia microcarpa) and Kubili (Cubilia cubili). Left-over seedlings were donated to the park’s nursery for future planting.

Attendees : Rey Palacio, Ernie Aquino, Dr. Roberto Coronel & crew, Gigi Morris, Noi Cruz & son, Mr. & Mrs. Ped Unson and Ving Sico

After a brief luncheon of Adobong manok and salted eggs, Dr. Coronel and his crew took the long drive here to Balinghasai farms to collect wild edible native fruits for study while the rest of the group decided to stay and see what the forest park has to offer. Dr. Coronel and I have corresponded thru email days before regarding what wild fruits are in season here in the area. Half a day of walking, driving and more walking yielded voucher specimen for Binayuyu (Antidesma ghaesembilla), Halubagat-baging (Capparis zeylanica / Capparis horrida), Kalubkob (Syzygium calubcob), Kayumkom (Ixora philippinensis), Balinawnaw (Lepisanthes fruticosa) and some scion materials.

Not beaten down by the weather, the good doctor still welcomed my invitation to tour even the farthest recess of the farm to check a wild-growing Garcinia by the creek that we’re really itching to identify. The genus was confirmed by noted field botanist Ulysses Ferreras but the exact identification yet remained unknown.

(200)

A family affair

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Jul 222012
 

June 3, 2024 - A few days after arriving from nearly a year of dreamy sojourn in Thailand, I took my lovely wife and 2 kids with me to the farm to do what I liked to call a little family affair : planting Philippine native trees. The kids, Hannah and Ben, are yet very young to understand the value of the activity but my wife, Pim, is already conscious of my interest in conserving and propagating true Philippine native trees. This was the first time for the kids to immerse in field work and I was a little excited myself in teaching them. Stepping onto the soft clayey soil even with his gumboots on was hard for Ben at first but everything seemed to go smoothly after that. We out-planted 10 seedlings of Anang (Diospyros pyrrhocarpa ) and 3 of Bagawak (Clerodendrum minnahasae); both native to my home province, Bulacan. The first was seed-collected along the forest trail in the nearby Biak na Bato National Park and the latter from wild mother trees that thrive in open grasslands around the farm.

It was a big day for the kids; they even managed to climb some dried bamboo stakes with gumboots on.

(129)

The beginning

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Jun 272012
 

In 2008, a modest 3.4 hectare woodland property located in a remote area in Bulacan was offered to me for sale. The place was densed with patches of wild trees like Binayuyu, Alibangbang, Ligas, Kalios among others and matted with persistent weeds, primarily Cogon and Talahib. Immediately, I thought of how much work and time it needs to make the place habitable but more so how much money I need to shell-out to buy the property and start a dream farm project. Despite the forseeable hard labor and impending headache such ambitious plan may give me, I still got excited! It must be my love for farming, my appreciation for the natural 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, that is :)



By 2009, we are already securing the whole lot with bamboo fence (which we replaced gradually with concrete posts later on), 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. (2078)