Green-Minded

Food growing warehouses in abandoned and unused buildings with vertical stacking farm tech are the rage now. From Japan after the Fukushima incident to Detroit renewing its urban wasteland with local farms and farm factories, growing food indoors has become a successful social, community and business adventure. Everything is grown pesticide-free, organic and sold fresh! Everything works as social enterprise--doing good for profit--making the best food one can grow indoors so food is free and available everywhere.

GMO Brands are currently insinuating in Manila news media that the Philippines can only avert a future food crisis if it adopts biotech agriculture (GMO foods). Russia has proven this as the biggest lie in the world by reorienting its economy to become the biggest organic food producers and exporters in the world. In fact, Russia earns more from selling food than from selling weapons to other countries! Rather than sustain GMO brands, we can resource our food requirements within the ASEAN and from Russia, and ask them to help us grow our own food like nobody's business.

Fleet Farming is a perfect example of a community based urban farming effort that promotes a sharing economy. They have a very organized system for making everything work including making use of fruits that would otherwise be spoiled--a gleaning operation meant to provide cheap and free food to the community. You can even pay them to set up your own food garden and harvest for yourself. If any good souls check them out, they would be the perfect rehab system for the urban poor, the rural disadvantaged and everyone else who wants to survive without being part of any rat race.

At a time when urban crime and homeless hungry kids roam the city streets as beggars, some enterprising people in urban cities in the U.S. are grafting fruit bearing branches onto park and sidewalk trees so that food can grow in the area. Many groups of guerilla gardeners roam urban streets in the west to reclaim public spaces for growing food and creating pollinator refuges. Going back to nature has also been advocated by some local lawmakers to solve complex urban problems with simple solutions like allowing ponds and catchments to exist in the city to solve floods. Guerilla gardeners want food to be available to everyone.

Just when you thought oil and toxic metals polluted rivers and waterways were doomed to oblivion, BMG Intepco, a Russian start-up based in England won accolades in the final competition of new technologies offered for purifying industrial waste water using natural microgels that absorb oils and effluent chemicals then force the dirt to settle at the bottom. The process is benign and has very low environmental impact which makes it very attractive as a low cost green clean-up tech. If ASEAN can support teh tech, rivers like Pasig's can be green again.

It is of grave concern that our country allowed the biggest GMO conglomerate to set up shop locally. You see constant articles in print media and even on TV that are outright endorsements for biotech or GMO agriculture as the only saving grace for the country's food supply. The righteous path can never be travelled by the wicked because they will perish. Be aware what GMO presents and watch what foods out there are tampered biotech products.

Food Forests are better than crop fields as a source of food. Mono-cropping vast tracts of land uses up precious and limited resources and drains the land of its nutrients. A food forest is a self-sustaining ecosystem for any type of organic food production in your backyard or in your homestead. Even in an urban setting, any open spaces may be assigned to a food growing ecoystem built around a Food Forest and this will be an enormous boost to the local community than just ornamental foliage and walking parks.

Growing food and keeping a farm together has gone Internet-of-Things with farm start-ups providing real-time farm management tools: digital soil sensors, weather pattern recognition systems, and online vegetable garden planners! You can even purchase a self-contained portable farm from Freight Farms. Even our own Department of Agriculture is developing soil sensors for real-time RICE farm management systems for Pinoy farmers.

Half the earth is now denuded because of man turning almost any wildlands into development sprawls or mono-crop agricultural pastures. Starting with trees for rewilding urban spaces and reduce pollution and flooding, urban planners can slowly make living urban spaces a happy communal area. A bioscientist has proposed rewilding half the earth to keep our planet alive. Check out simple yet essential solutions to climate change that we should consider.

Among the readily available and inexpensive indoor plants you can get for filtering and soaking up airborne pollutants in your home, the Devil Vine or Devil's Ivy is one hardy and prolific creeper that you should grow in your backyard. When you have some, make some cuttings for desktop plants for indoors too. Devil's Vine has been proven in some bio-studies by NASA on the Internation Space Station to filter benzene and formaldehyde very well. Avoid getting cancer from pollutants that soak the air in your home and get some Devil's Vine potted in some containers for your indoor organic air filter system.

A recent study confirms that living near trees helps people stay sane and healthy. Green living isn't just about keeping a Food Forest in your backyard but having trees growing everywhere in our communities. Instead of manicured and sculpted gardens and parks of ornamental plants, creating an urban forest park and urban food forests might be the best renewal project for our communities. People in Toronto already vouch that they'd choose living near trees over a pay raise or living in a posh, treeless neighborhood.

Green spaces abound everywhere in the city and converting them into Food Gardens or orchards may help provide both food security and a better resilience for when the Supply Grid falters. No need to worry about the shelves of your supermarket running out during an extreme situation when you can walk a couple of blocks and get both free fresh produce or cheap local food from the municipal garden. They can even provide heirloom seeds for your own home garden needs!

Susan Vergara and her team have been making the rounds of local agricultural regions, showing an organic soil enhancing product to farmers actively invovled in growing organic produce. King Humus Plus is a special kind of certified organic product for creating soil environments that allow produce to grow robustly according to organic farming standards. REACH interviews Susan Vergara, the business partner that distributes this amazing agricultural product.

If you have a garden and can have zoning permissions for such trees, Bamboo is one tree-grass that is essential when you need to survive off the grid.

A garden is a place that will always have bugs and insects. From the crawling insects to the flying ones, garden plants always attract insect pests. However, some of these insects are beneficial in the garden. While some bugs gobble on the garden plants and their fruits, another group of insects is coming to the rescue. They are the insects that gardeners would love to have in their garden.

Starting a container food garden and growing vegetables and want to know how it works with what you like? Here is a basic guide to the most common vegetables that still grow well in container gardens.

Seems pedestrian or something relegated to retirees and gardening enthusiasts. Container Gardening for Food, from Vegetables to Spices and Herbs is one Survival Essential you will never regret getting into and getting good at. Watch Miyazaki's Graveyard of the Fireflies. You'll Want your Container Vegetable Garden ready Yesterday.

We all hear the buzz about living off-grid becoming a serious lifestyle choice for many. Not just retirees or yuppies and celebrity sports stars getting tired of the rat race, but even young kids turning to agriculture and farming as a way of life. Not just for the coming zombie apocalypse which everyone has a mad-on for. Living off-grid also means smarter living and a discipline that will keep one in good stead. Zombies be or not.