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Her love for flowers and passion for growing them has proven a perfect mix for Arquilla Gabucan and her husband Ronnie, who successfully grow and sell flowers for a living.
When Arquilla married Ronnie in 1985, her husband already had a flower farm growing roses in partnership with his aunt. The farm was given to them as a wedding gift.
According to Arquilla, the roses were their source of income while starting up their own family. She said she was a regular employee of Timex in the Mactan Export Processing Zone (Mepz), Lapu-Lapu City for two years until her husband told her to stop working and focus on taking care of their first child in 1986.
“We can’t entrust our child to the nanny especially in that we are living along the road and we fear something might happen to her if we just leave her with the nanny. So eventually I stopped working at Timex and attended to them.”
Upon becoming a full time mom, Arquilla said that she always found time to tend to their garden even though it was her husband who woke early each morning to water the plants and weed the area as well as apply fertilizers and other chemical enhancers for the flowers.
After five years of growing roses, the couple decided to switch to growing other flowers like chrysanthemum and Malaysian mums as roses required a lot of tending and chemical input while the others plants required less labor.
“We spent P10,000 for that shift because I had to buy mother plants which I then reproduced,” Arquilla said.
On Nov. 15, 2008, Arquilla was one of the lucky winners in the Kapamilya Negosyo Na program, which earned her P10,000 in cash prizes plus P5,000 for business permit processing.
The program is a flagship project of the the University of San Carlos College of Commerce Alumni Association, which aims to promote entrepreneurship among its beneficiaries. The winners are given seed money of P15,000.
Arquilla used her P10,000 cash to buy new flower plants like gerbera or anthuriums.
Their flower business has already helped the couple in their needs like having bought a motorcycle unit which her husband sometimes use as habal-habal to earn extra income for the family.
Managing the farm is not easy, as one needs to do regular weeding of the area twice in a month and they have to pay people to do that as they cannot finish it by themselves. “Per day we pay P100 just to weed the area at the same time cultivate the soil.”
Fertilizers and chemical sprays are another input that they have to do once in a week to keep their plants healthy and avoid pests from attacking.
“In a month we would spend over P1,000 for weeding, fertilizers, and chemical sprays and sometimes we earn P4,000 to P6,000 from selling the flowers.”
Arquilla's brother helps her in selling her flowers because he has a stall in the city where he also sells his flowers. Aside from that, Arquilla also supplies flowers to Golden Haven. which has a “captive market.”
“On November 1 and 2, I will be supplying the flowers for Golden Haven and do arrangements, too, at only P150, which most customers would say is very affordable for the kind of flowers and arrangement that I do,” she said.
Arquilla plans to expand her area so that she can grow more flowers. She also plans to open her own flower shop near her home in Sitio Hoyohoy, Busay as a start because, according to her, her business is still growing and she still cannot afford to rent a space in the city. “Sa karon diri lang usa.”
Arquilla now has an official and registered name for her business after processing a permit in the City Hall, "I named it after my kids so CH5 Flower and Creative Touches Shop is the best name."
