In this video, Ronald Brown, Managing Director of Casa Esperanza of Angels Foundation, takes us on a tour of their lovely garden in Dumaguete City, in tropical Philippines. The fruit trees, flowering plants, vegetables, and ornamental plants will eventually become part of the food production and landscaping project at Casa Esperanza of Angels orphanage, now under construction in Tanjay City, once the facility becomes operational.
Here’s a full transcript of the video:
Hello, my name is Ronald Brown. I’m the Managing Director for the Casa Esperanza of Angels.
Today we’re coming to you from Dumaguete. We’ll be building our orphanage facility in Tanjay which is about 35 kilometers north of here but this is our rental home while we construct our facility in Tanjay City.
Today, we’d like to talk to you about our sustainability program. We have almost two hectares of property that we will be landscaping and we’ll also be planting vegetable gardens, fruit trees, and other ornamental plants. Some of these will be part of our sustainability program to produce some of our own food so we’d like to show you some of the plants we’d been propagating over the last couple of years and just let you see our progress so far.
Behind me, we have a carambola tree (Averrhoa carambola), which is also known as a starfruit tree. It’s bearing fruit, we’ve gotten fruit off it several times already.
This is one of our three varieties of papaya trees that we’re growing. We have various vines, flowering vines. These are all our hibiscus plants. They’ve been trimmed to keep them smaller so not many are blooming right now but we have various colors of hibiscus plants, as well.
Here we have about 15 to 16 pineapple plants. We’ve already produced pineapple and eaten those, they’re very delicious and sweet.
These are all our citrus trees. We have pomelo, which is like a grapefruit. We have calamansi, which is the Philippine lime.
We also have many lemon trees. As you can see, the lemon trees are not shy about producing fruit for us already at this young age.
Here are mango trees. Mangoes are very popular in the Philippines. We have three already started, so a couple of different varieties of mango trees growing already.
There are a couple of our other papaya trees, young ones. Here’s ginger. And this tree here in the back, it’s a fruit tree called atis. We also have tambis. And this one’s called chico. So these are all different varieties of fruit trees, as well.
Back here is a tree called katuray and you can see the blooms in the trees, they are edible. Not many people here eat them but some other Southeast Asian countries also eat the flowers from this tree.
This is a guava tree, so we have guava growing as well.
Here we have a lot of different ornamental type plants. Here’s a poinsettia. We have palm trees, different flowering trees and shrubs. All these will be part of our landscaping project for the orphanage facility.
These are avocado trees, we have quite a few little avocado trees. My wife and I love avocadoes. These will also be part of our food producing program.
Behind me here are our dragon fruit plants (Hylocereus undatus). We have not yet gotten any dragon fruit yet, they’re kind of slow growing but we’re hoping that in the future we can also get some dragon fruits out of these.
Here, we have some of our shade plants, plants that prefer a little more shade and not quite so much sun as we have here in the Philippines and the brutal heat.
Here are some orchids, we also have some other variety of orchids down here, a variety of ferns, and just a variety of different shade loving plants.
We also have some kiwi vines. They don’t really like this Philippine heat but we’re giving them a try anyway. Maybe, someday, we’ll get some kiwi out of these.
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