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Pomologist Bernie Dizon, who runs a tree nursery and techno demo farm at the Ninoy Aquino Parks and Wildlife in Quezon City has every reason to be ecstatic. After 14 years of raising and pampering his imported lychee and mangosteen, he will finally harvest the first batch of fruits from these trees by June or earlier.

Dizon Farms in Q.C. utilizes all kinds of technology and biotechnology available locally and elsewhere, and Dizon himself propagates whatever new knowledge he has acquired to other people through free seminars at the Dizon Farms in the Nature Park every second and fourth Sundays of the month— right beside the expansive and well-stocked lagoon.

One such technology that Dizon can claim that really worked for him is the use of Exquisite bio fertilizer and soil conditioner which he tried for the first time last November. After only two weeks of using the product, he noticed flowerings, an indication that fruits are following next.

“Previously, my trees just kept having flashings or the emergence of new leaves but without the expected flowering and fruiting. It just kept on producing flashings. For 14 years I had this kind of cycle. I was losing hope already,” Dizon said.

During a recent visit to his farm at the Nature Park we saw a lot of flowers from the lychee tree; rambutan; mangosteen; carabao mangoes; lanzones; chokonan mango (the premier mango of Thailand and Malaysia); the durian (which was heavy with small fruits); Longkan and the Davao pomelo.

The Dizon Farm, which usually has lots of visitors during these workshop days, teemed not just with fruits on trees but with excited people buying seedlings and the Exquisite products, which were being sold by the staff of Chong Ken Foo, president of Exquisite Philippines. Chong himself delivered lectures to the workshop participants while his staff taught the buyers on the proper dosage to be used in the plants.

By June, Dizon Farms will be expecting its harvest from these “impossible” exotic fruit trees and expectedly his buyers will come by not just to buy the fruits but also to witness for themselves how productive the fruit trees had been.

“Just as I am helping Chong promote his products, I am also helping my trees and those of my buyers by telling them of the benefits of Exquisite products,” Dizon said.

Among the popular technologies that Dizon is promoting during his lectures are topworking—or grafting the carabao mango and the chokonan mango with each other by slicing a small branch at the top and tying them together with plastic so that eventually they develop a common root system. With so many of these “topworked” roots systems in one tree, his technology is a multiple rootstock technology.

Using the topwork system and enhancing the natural soil bacteria with Exquisite soil conditioner and the leaves (foliage) with bio fertilizer, the farm of Dizon and those of his converts will no doubt be a success, remarked Chong.

Exquisite—which has been in the country for the past six years—is a technology perfected and widely used in China and has been successfully tried and tested by agricultural state colleges and universities in their techno demo farms in various crops, principally rice, banana, vegetables and other fruits. Chong said Exquisite, to a certain extent, can claim credit for China’s successful agriculture.

Some private fishpond owners and even the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources has tried using Exquisite soil conditioner to enrich the soil of fishponds to ensure the rapid development and growth of beneficial algae and fungi needed by the fish and aquatic resources.

In fact, the soil conditioner—a misnomer of sorts because it not just conditions the soil but other living things with natural trace bacteria as well— have been found beneficial to poultry and free-range chickens; to livestock and even staples like rice and corn.