Agriculture Business Week

While the global crisis is reducing consumption across nations and social classes, causing massive unemployment and constricting the world economy to a precarious extent, other sectors are cashing in on some of its unexpected beneficial effects.

Among them is the herbs and other plants sector, which is experiencing immense growth, -according to Edsa Garden House consultant Pearl Banaag.

“Coupled with the thriving niche markets that promote and encourage healthy living for cosmopolitan lifestyles, herbs and other plants are now slowly taking centerstage,” Banaag said.

The need for healthy living seems to conspire with the current need to cut cost in every possible aspect of today’s life, especially with the soaring prices of medicine and healthcare.

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Whenever there is a demand for any product, there is always that opportunity to make money. Just like the many useful herbs that are increasingly being used for culinary purposes as well as for their medicinal benefits. Some make excellent tea. Many of them are also used in beauty products

And so collecting and growing such useful herbs can be rewarding. Growing them organically will even make them more enticing to the health conscious. One can grow them for personal use only, or for giving them away as special gifts to friends and relatives. Of course, they can also be grown commercially so they can be made available for sale to the general public at a reasonable price. They could be processed into virtually endless products of commerce.

One lady who has been collecting a lot of culinary and medicinal herbs is Mrs. Adela Ang who has a big propagation area in Antipolo City and a showcase at the Manila Seedling Bank compound in Quezon City. She has high-tech facilities for rooting cuttings as well as germinating seeds, using sterilized growing media.

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Growing herbs for culinary, aroma therapeutic and medicinal purposes is becoming increasingly popular in the Philippines. Some of them are utilized as freshly harvested leaves while others are dried for future use.

Here are some useful pointers on harvesting, drying and storing these useful herbs. It is from the pamphlet of Aubin’s Village from Rockhampton, Australia. Herbs have to be harvested correctly, otherwise they will lose their value. Harvest the plants on a dry day. Don’t harvest them if the dew has not disappeared.

Pick the herbs and place them into a flat box or baskets to avoid crushing or bruising. Don’t gather more than what can be dealt with at a particular time because they do not retain their fragrance for long periods.

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The success of a good harvest starts from good seeds and every farmer needs to know the proper way of storing them.

Seed is the most valuable able input for anyone who is into farming. Failure of the seeds to germinate would mean additional production cost, not to mention delay in farm operations. It is therefore important to make sure that seed for planting have high germination percentage. But how can one be ascertained of the quality of the seeds or that the seeds still have high germination percentage? Here are timely tips for those who are interested in farming or gardening.

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