Growing Mushrooms at PinoyEcoFarm

Mar 15

edbcleofeagriculture, food, Philippines , , , No Comments

We have been harvesting mushrooms weekly from the farm in the past few weeks. My kids love them in creamy soups. I sometimes mix them in egg omelette and it goes well with onions, tomatoes and cheese.

We were curious on how to grow them so we bought some prepared setup from EgSeeds in Tagaytay-Mendez Crossing at P20 per pack. We hanged the packs using old ribbons inside a dark makeshift room. The small room is a temporary storage area cum bathroom. For now, we are just content with harvesting them for our own consumption but we are planning to grow more for selling.

Here is the link on Mushroom Cultivation reference that I posted earlier.

 

Pollinator-Friendly Practices in New FAO Handbook

Mar 12

edbcleofeagriculture No Comments

Smallholder farmers will soon be better able to weigh up the cost and benefits of adopting new practices that support some of the most overlooked contributors to global food security – the insects and other animals that pollinate their crops and boost yields. “Three quarters of all food crops need insect pollinators such as bees to get good yields, and 35 percent of all food production globally comes from crops dependent on pollinators – but there are worrying reports of declines in pollinators from several regions of the world,” says Barbara Gemmill-Herren of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Now, Maryanne Grieg-Gran of the International Institute for Environment and Development and Gemmill-Herren have co-authored “Handbook for Participatory Socioeconomic Evaluation of Pollinator-Friendly Practices”. This is a handbook that smallholder farmers and organizations that work with them can use to identify such pollinator-friendly practices and evaluate their impacts on livelihoods, incomes and health. “Sharing information with farmers about pollinator-friendly practices is a good first step,” says Grieg-Gran. “But farmers will adopt pollinator-friendly practices only if they can see that these practices will bring benefits to them – and while cash always helps, other less tangible benefits may also be important.”

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Practical Way to Water Our Plants

Mar 07

edbcleofeagriculture, natural farming, organic farming, Philippines 2 Comments

It is summertime and watering our plants has now become a must. However it takes so much of our time just to complete the task so we figured a way to make it more practical and less time consuming. We filled the discarded 1.5 soda PET bottles with water and fish amino acid (FAA) mixture, bored a small hole in the soda cap and placed them directly on the plants in an inverted position. The mixture trickles slowly and it takes about 2 days before replenishing the bottles again. We hope that this strategy works so we can save more water and devote more time to other farm activities.