Community Vegetable Garden

Community Vegetable Garden GLORIA DEO

To God all the Glory

Our community vegetable garden is now well established. Community vegetable gardening has become a popular way to supplement food sources for many low-income people in South Africa. With more than 36 percent1 of the population in South Africa experiencing food insecurity, community vegetable gardens offer apartment dwellers, low-income families and retirees a chance to improve their health and outlook by producing fresh produce and interacting with neighbours. Community vegetable gardening also teaches young children that food is not a product of the supermarket, but the result of tilling and nurturing the soil. A vegetable garden is great way to engage community members around healthy, local food. The garden will also serve as an educational tool to teach children that healthy eating can be fun and taste good and to where required provide cooked vegetables on a daily basis to the elderly folk in the community.

Our goal is to –

Improve children’s health
Increasing learning ability school
Ease the “HUNGER” burden
Improve children and elderly lives
Ease the financial burden on women/mothers
Self- sustainability for the soupkitchen

Interesting Facts –

Through hard work and dedication we converted a rubbish dump into a beautiful vegetable garden; we used 160 tons of soil to fill up the land for our vegetable garden. Our vegetable garden consists of -

• An Organic Vegetable Garden

• A Hydroponics Vegetable Garden

• A Traditional Vegetable Garden

Our first vegetables were planted in August 2014 and harvested in November 2014.

We identified and empowered 10 people in the community by providing them with formal training on organic vegetable gardening.

Our vegetable gardens are properly maintained and are now established.

We are able to provide enough vegetables from our vegetable gardens for our children’s meals and we are able to provide cooked vegetables to our elderly folk in the community.

This initiative is a long term sustainability project in the provision of vegetables to our Soup kitchen.

The participation of our children and adults in the community is so inspirational. It is an amazing experience to see how they fall in love with gardening and the astonishment from the children when they get to harvest the carrots and especially the beautiful organic strawberries, there facial expressions when they eat the fresh strawberries is precious…