Hardin ng Lunas opens at Camp Aquino

MANILA, Philippines - A three-hectare organic vegetable garden and fruit orchard known as the Hardin ng Lunas and located at Camp General Servillano Aquino in Tarlac City was recently inaugurated with a harvest festival as its highlight.

Dr. Isa Cojuangco Suntay, who chairs the Tarlac Heritage Foundation, said, “This is the second phase of the Hardin ng Lunas project and it involves for the first time the participation of members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (Nolcom) with active military personnel planting organic vegetables, fruit-bearing trees and medicinal plants in a three-hectare area.”

President Aquino, who inaugurated the first Hardin ng Lunas project in Moncada last year, said this project would be a source of comfort to rural Tarlaquenos who are far from doctors, nurses and health facilities. 

He said Hardin ng Lunas is a way of “empowering people to be masters of their fate and welfare.” 

He added that people “should know that health is not a privilege but a right and that the benefits of development are shared specifically to those who work hard.”

Hardin ng Lunas leaders, together with the officers, men and women of Camp General Servillano Aquino, Tarlac Heritage Foundation, East West Seed Co. and B & O Green Corp., aim to provide training at the launch site or to reach out to interested members of the military community and their dependents or civilian military employees or owners of idle lands throughout the province to train them on organic vegetable farming methods, expose them to new technologies in the field, make available to them organic vegetable seedlings that are ready for transplant, introduce them to new crop varieties and link the beneficiaries to buyers of these organic vegetables within and outside their communities.