Robert Fulghum and Carlos Solana

From one of the yearly foreign trips my lady, Carmen, took, decades ago, she gifted me with a thin paperback. It was a special present even if it was different from the usual Philosophy and law books she would bring home. I smiled upon reading the title, All I Really Need To Know, I Learned in Kindergarten, because I thought Robert Fulghum, the author, had me in his mind when he published it first in 1986. It was a relevant booklet in our family considering that every opportunity I had, I would tell my children, then still growing, that this and that I learned from my elementary years in Candijay, Bohol. Often I exaggerated in my narration but most of the time I tried to be factual.

My horticulture teacher in Candijay Elementary School was a bespactacled and soft-spoken Carlos Solana. May his soul rest in peace. Sir Solana led my classmates and me in planting trees along the perimeter of the school. Only in my sunset years have I realized how impactful that project was to our environment. But, back then, I learned some important lessons. The holes he told us to dig were, in our minds, rather large and deep for the saplings that we planted. Those diggings had to be oversized because we needed to put first dried and pulverized carabao manure mixed with finely shredded rice stalks. We, the pupils, assumed that our horticulture teacher had scientific basis for the mixing proportion he used. It looked to us that his mixture was perfect considering the robust growing of the plants.

Fast forward to the early years of this millennium. When I bought a very small piece of land in Barangay Paril, this city, I decided to contribute, no matter how insignificantly, my personal efforts to the greening of the environment. While I began to cultivate a garden plot with vegetables like batong, paliya and tawong in alternate manner, I planted trees along the boundaries of my small property.

Like how Fulghum wrote, I applied what I learned from Mr. Solana, my grade five (1961-62) gardening teacher, in my present tree-planting activity. In that grade level, our preferred tree was teak, which I learned much later in life to be more of an Indonesian indigenous plant than ours. More recently, I have chosen to plant mabolo and tugas, both hardwood. Incidentally, the mabolo lumber is known locally as kamagong. The learning in my elementary grades is of great influence. Before planting a seedling, I always prepare the soil which is a mixture of horse and carabao manure and shredded rice stalks. Using Mr. Solana’s formula, I mix one sack of horse manure with another sack of carabao manure, and whenever available, with still one sack of “dagami.”

When I was in Grade 6, gardening was not our subject anymore. We had industrial arts under Mr. Salvador Bayron, now also deceased. At that grade level, we still witnessed Sir Solana accompanying our juniors in attending to the trees we planted. In the afternoons of hottest days, they still watered the plants. Why? He told us that newly planted trees had to be nurtured for about three years to ensure survival.

That is what I have been doing to date. I do not just plant trees. I take care of them year round, as if Sir Solana were supervising. In fact, I always communicate with DENR personalities, Mr. Raul Pasoc and Mr. Jose Cleo Colis, asking for their Mr. Solana kind of additional advice, even if we do not personally know each other.

Since, the time I started planting, there are now more than 200 mabolos, 300-plus tugas, about 100 narra and guyabanos growing side by side some fruit trees in my small mountain garden. The mortality rate is just about 3%. If it sounds incredible, you might agree that Fulghum was right.