At first glance, it looks like someone’s backyard.
A modest one, clearly loved, slightly worn. The kind kept by someone who doesn’t mind getting their hands dirty. Someone who believes in quiet routines and growth you can’t always see.
There are rows of spring onions and okra, leaning toward the sun like schoolchildren at morning assembly. Old tires have been painted and turned into garden beds. Coconut husks line the footpaths like breadcrumbs. A stray slipper hides beneath a malunggay bush.
But this isn’t someone’s backyard.
This is Culandanum Elementary School, tucked away in the farming town of Aborlan, Palawan, and this garden isn’t a hobby. It’s a mission.
Here, vegetables aren’t just growing. They’re feeding. They’re healing. They’re teaching children, some of whom arrive on empty stomachs, what it means to care for something and be nourished in return.
You might walk past it without noticing. But isn’t that how transformation often begins? Quietly, patiently, in the dirt.
The garden doesn’t look like much, until you look closer.
A row of eggplants becomes a science lesson in photosynthesis. A compost pit turns into a crash course on climate resilience. A child learns that the things she plants with her own hands can one day end up on her plate, and maybe even on her neighbor’s.
This is the Gulayan sa Paaralan Program (GPP), a growing initiative by the Department of Education (DepEd) that’s as much about curriculum as it is about compassion.
What began as a simple school gardening project has now expanded to 44,965 schools nationwide for School Year 2025–2026—a 50.6% increase from 2022.
It now supports the School-Based Feeding Program (SBFP), providing fresh, organic produce for children who are undernourished or at risk.
But in communities like Culandanum, where store-bought vegetables are often a luxury and processed food is more common than fruit, this is more than a government program. It’s a life-changing intervention, one leaf, one meal, one child at a time.
In remote towns like Aborlan, Rizal, Quezon and Brooke’s Point, where IP schools are prominent, access to nutrition and basic educational resources remains a daily struggle. Some classrooms still don’t have enough chairs.
Teachers stretch tiny budgets into miracles. And the children? They show up anyway, hungry, hopeful, determined.
A school garden here isn’t a decoration. It’s infrastructure. It’s healthcare. It’s resilience, rooted in soil.
That’s why DepEd doubled the GPP budget from ₱10 million in 2021 to ₱20 million in 2024, with another ₱21.8 million projected for 2025.
The investment is small compared to other national programs, but its returns? Massive. Fuller meals, brighter minds, stronger communities.
It doesn’t stop with vegetables. GPP is now being complemented by the expansion of Farm Schools, with 152 currently operating across four regions.
Institutionalized through Republic Act No. 10618, these schools aim to embed agricultural knowledge into formal education, especially for rural learners whose futures may depend not on diplomas alone, but on the land beneath their feet.
The late Senator Ed Angara once envisioned this future; a Philippines where children in the provinces are empowered to innovate within their own farmlands, not leave them. Now, his son, Education Secretary Sonny Angara, is pushing that dream forward.
Now pause.
Imagine if every school in Palawan had a garden like Culandanum’s, from the coastal annex schools in the coasts of Balabac to the mountain trails of Rizal.
Imagine if school cafeterias served food grown by students. If compost bins outnumbered plastic wrappers. If home economics taught food sovereignty, and kids went home not just with homework, but with harvest.
Imagine communities where families learned from their children, where a ten-year-old’s tomato plant sparked a backyard garden at home. Where food security wasn’t an abstract goal, but a daily, living reality.
Imagine if we didn’t have to imagine.
Because it’s already happening. It’s just not happening everywhere, yet. Not because it’s too expensive. Not because it’s too difficult. But because it asks something deeper of us. It asks us to change how we see schools. Not just as test-taking factories, but as engines of local change. As places where futures grow, literally.
Hunger looks different in the mountains. Malnutrition doesn’t always scream, it shows up in stunted growth, in cloudy eyes, in children dropping out not because they lack potential, but because they lacked breakfast.
And yet, amid this quiet crisis, the solution is literally growing beneath our feet. This isn’t just about farming. It’s about equipping the next generation to survive climate, poverty, and inequality, with their hands, their land, and their knowledge.
It’s about recognizing that in places like Aborlan, Rizal, Quezon, Bataraza, Brooke’s Point, or Balabac, food security starts with giving children a seed, a space, and a reason to stay in school.
Let it be the reason a child in an upland sitio doesn’t just imagine a better future, but plants it, waters it, and lives to harvest it.
Because when children grow food with their own hands, they don’t just eat better. They dream bigger. They carry something home. And maybe that’s how we begin, by growing gardens that grow us back
