Cabbages and chilis and cucumbers, oh my!

For Department of Education employees, Friday is literally “market day.”

Personnel at the DepEd central office can now shop for fresh vegetables right on site as the agency’s own front yard farm has started to yield health-promoting crops.

And at the end of the workweek, employees may take their pick from an assortment of tomatoes, chili, cabbage, lettuce, cucumber and eggplant.

“We sell the harvest to employees for P10 lower than the market price. If they want to avail themselves of the vegetables, we have our market day,” Dr. Juan Araojo, deputy chief of DepEd’s health and nutrition office, told the Inquirer.

Upon the directive of Education Secretary Armin Luistro, himself an avid weekend gardener, DepEd employees started planting its own vegetable garden at the front lawn of the department’s main office in Pasig City on July 11, coinciding with Nutrition Month.

Araojo, among the lead officials responsible for the veggie gardening project, said utility workers and employees worked together in planting and watching over crops while a team was organized to oversee the harvest cycle, from yield to sale to acquiring seeds to replant the plots.

“We have a three-layer garden because the secretary also wanted a vegetable garden with an aesthetic touch. It’s like landscaping using vegetables. Plus we benefit from the produce,” Araojo said.

DepEd also created a mushroom house where some 500 bags of white mushrooms provided a generous yield daily, Araojo said.

Currently the most “saleable” crop, DepEd would at times earn a net income of P1,000 daily from the mushroom harvest.

The department had established a trust account for its vegetable sales, a fund that would be revolved for the purchase of new seeds, fertilizers and other gardening needs, Araojo said.

“We hope it will serve as a model for our 17 regions and divisions to replicate so they will have their own gulayan at their own grounds,” said Araojo.

“We felt that if we’re advocating Gulayan sa Paaralan, we should plant and grow our own veggies as well as eat them,” he added, referring to the DepEd project that encourages all schools to establish their own vegetable gardens.

Upon taking the education post, Luistro initiated a program to encourage the planting of vegetables in schools both as a learning activity and alternative means of livelihood for communities.

DepEd has teamed up with the OMG! advocacy of Senator Edgardo Angara to expand its vegetable garden project in schools to address malnutrition among public school children.

For this school year, BDO Foundation, Asian Terminals Inc., Sunwest Care Foundation, Infant Pediatrics and Nutrition Association of the Philippines and Aboitiz Foundation are adopting a total of 40 public elementary schools across Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. They are underwriting the costs of creating vegetable plots at their chosen schools for the planting of kalabasa, sitaw, patola, talong, kamatis, ampalaya and other common vegetables.

The school gardening program also includes the training of teachers in the nutritional benefits of vegetables through an instructional module to be included in their home economics lesson.

According to the Food and Nutrition Research Institute, 26 out of every 100 school-age children in the country are malnourished, the most common forms of malnutrition being vitamin and mineral deficiencies.

Green leafy vegetables are rich sources of vitamins and minerals.