Atikha: A Sneakpeek to Our Daily Province Life

Morning

The day starts with coffee as the morning sun peeks through the orange sky and the scent of the morning dew soothes your mind.

Rice and eggs is the staple breakfast. Our chickens and turkeys are already making noise outside. They're waiting for their morning meal as they greet you a good morning.

Chickens, Ducks and Turkeys

We would give our chickens some grains in the morning and afternoon. We would just dash and scatter small amounts since they are free-range chickens and most of their nutrition comes from the nearby grass fields.

Our ducks and turkeys are semi-free-range since they live in a large enclosed pasture with our goats. We feed them with mixed feeds for their nutrition since the size of the pasture isn't enough to sustain them. This ensures they will continuously produce eggs all year round.

Ducks are, I can say, the toughest of them all. They can survive in harsh weather conditions. And yes they can fly.

But the turkeys are my personal favorite. They can grow really big, don't have strong-smelling waste, and would sometimes jump out of the fence to check and visit you.

Pigs

By seven in the morning, we should have already prepared the food for our pigs. The pig pen isn't near, so we'd have to walk for less than a hundred steps.

The pen should be cleaned and the pigs bathed first before we feed them.

They eat three times a day, and the pig pen cleaning is done twice a day. They are given a full bath in the afternoon or noon time depending on the weather.

Goats

I like that these fellas can tend food to their own. They would just eat grass and some low-lying leaves in the pasture.

Goats do not like being wet, so they tend to just stay inside their barn when it's raining. And if it does, we'd have to get them their grass and their favorite leaves.

Normally we would just clean their barns, fill their basins with clean water, and do a routine health check.

Grass-Cutting and Removing Weeds

There are these weeds that crawl and climb to anything it latches to. It would then flourish and swarm a plant or a bush and would, later on, kill the plant as weed blocks off sunlight. They have to be removed before they spread.

Then we do grass-cutting once every quarter when the grass are getting tall. We use a sickle if we will give them to the goats or if it's just a small area, otherwise, we'll use the gas-powered grass cutter.

Watering the Plants

We started some garden plots nearby and planted some cacao, papaya, mulberries and madre de agua. Madre de agua will be mainly used for animal feed alternatives so we planted several of them.

For the newly planted, we cover them with banana leaves to protect them from the scorching heat in our area.

This photo above is a "Madre de Agua".

In the science world, it is called Trichantera gigantea. Commonly, this fodder tree is known as “madre de agua” or “nacedero.” In other parts of South America, its other names are “cajeto” in Colombia, “suiban” or “cenicero” in Bolivia), “tuno” in Guatemala, “naranjillo” in Venezuela, “palo de agua” in Panama, and “pau santo” in Brazil.

reference: https://philippinemorningpost.com/madre-de-agua-as-livestock-feed/

Bananas and Coconuts

We have a small number of banana trees planted along our land boundaries.

We check them from time to time to see if they have harvestable fruits and heart (the actual flower). Banana hearts are edible and used as ingredients for a number of recipes. One of them is our favorite, banana heart in coconut milk (ginataang puso ng saging).

Speaking of coconuts, we also have a few of them. We harvest coconuts when we want to make coconut juice, coconut salad, and coconut milk. But we mostly reserve them for processing coconut milk since it is one of the main ingredients in making desserts and meal recipes.

Recreation

Not much to say here. We just enjoy being in touch with nature. It's amazing and wonderful how nature gives you peace and tranquility the moment you wake up, and before you close your eyes.

And here's a refreshing ice-cold coconut juice made with young coconut water and grated coconut flesh - a perfect way to relax and cool down.

Sunset

nothing to write, just speechless...

atikha - gradual accumulation of an amount by saving. (noun).

Through hard work, love your family, and together build your dream home.

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Made with love in the Philippines.