FOR THOSE who believe they possess the proverbial green thumb, it will only be much later when you realize that there is also the added task of taking care of what you plant in your garden (or whatever you call your tiny patch of earth, because ours is just one long plant box).
However, when one starts their project, they’ll realize that the vibe is almost like decorating a room. Not the fun part, mind you. The onset may constantly be filled with excitement and joy, but once the euphoria of that is over, it’ll dawn on you that almost everything has become a chore.
Back on the subject of vibe, living in the suburbs with very tiny spaces available for planting is not without the related quirks. For example, because of the limitation on where to do gardening, a lot of our neighbors have gone into what I would call theme gardening.
During the pandemic, for example, and the stay-at-home period that came with it, some people started procuring ornamental plants, especially orchids and such, as a kind of therapy in coping with cabin fever and being cooped up for so long.
Expensive as these plants were, the owners soon found out that they could sell their ornamental plants online and to neighbors. And with the proliferation of door-to-door transactions, they could go city-wide too. And so, like a slow roll downhill, what started out as a form of stress relief turned into a successful venture despite the lockdown.
This went on way past the pandemic period, until it slowly waned when stores in the city were allowed to open. As we’ve long been tending our small lot since we moved here in 01. We never got in with rest, so we lost out in worrying about themes.
We initially planted Moringa (Malunggay), which we lined up and later used as a temporary fence. The matey later added a mishmash of herbs and edibles like Malabar spinach (or Alugbati) and Blue Ternate. We even received other seeds from birds that dropped them in our yard. Talk about air service.
From the early years till now, our two families, both here and Gensan, have given us a mix of various orchids and herbs, so that we didn’t have time anymore for our neighbors’ thematic pursuits. Thus, our garden reminded me of that early PC app, WYSIWYG, or what you see is what you get.
Still, the simple task of maintaining our tiny plot has become a killer. If left untended, it grows wild or becomes overrun by bugs and weeds. So, when we returned from a 15-month stay abroad, we had the Moringa fence uprooted to make way for a real, honest-to-goodness cemented fence. In the process, many plants had to go too. One neighbor passing by casually joked, ‘at last, it now looks like a house.’
Eventually, they grew back, the chore of trimming the Alugbati and other plants lest they intrude into the proximity of our direct neighbors still took most of our time, even with the fence and all. Particularly during the summer, when it becomes super dry, watering the plants twice daily has become our time-consuming routine, plant box or not, that’s the way it goes.
