Why grow your own vegetables

Are you :
- Frustrated of being held captive by the recent spat of sharp food price increases?
- Wary of what vendors spray onto vegetables and fruits to make them greener, and last longer on the shelves?
- Sick of use of excessive and banned fertilisers by farmers?
- Fearful of unwarranted use of questionable additives to make crops mature faster ?

If you are frustrated, wary, sick and fearful just like me, maybe it's time to consider doing a bit of farming ourselves.

I appreciate the turn off :
- Don't have the land to farm
- Don't know nuts about farming
- Expensive and not cost-effective
- Laborous and messy

I came across something on the internet recently. It's called Earthbox. It's a unique box designed to make backyard farming very simple, productive, and requiring very small footprints. By using the earthbox, any idiot can grow his own salad easily. You can grow anywhere -- in the backyard, at rooftops, some small little corner. Basically, it's a self-watering contraption, with slow-fertiliser release and continuous moisturised potting mix.

The bad news is, it's not cheap. The good news is, it really works remarkably well and the concept is easily duplicated. You can just go collect some plastic containers and knock in place something similar. It won't look as good, but it will do the same job.

I intend to construct some myself using fibreglass for the box. My design will take into consideration the much higher rate of evaporation in our tropical country. I will post in the next few days the drawings and explanations for the concept.

For those of you interested in planting some vegetables yourself, stay tuned in. I will show you green fingers are not required to create your own vegetable garden. Forget about those hydrophonic systems at rooftops. Does all those water pipes running all over the place, the water flowing all the time, the fertilisers circulating everywhere, make you cringe? You will have none of that. It's really very simple.

Apart from the box design, I am also putting together a collection of vegetables grown in Philippines which you can try to plant yourself.

Chiao for now.