Moshi, TZ – MMC family garden’s success – 31 Dec 2013

The MMC family has shown that hard work, best practices, and resourcefulness are critical inputs on the path out of poverty. The family has overcome drought, flood, and the challenges of daily life to put themselves in a position to improve their lives.

MMC family picture in front of their house.

Constant mulching (covering garden beds with dry grasses to reduce evaporation) and twice-daily watering are best practices that helped the family maintain a productive vegetable garden through droughts and dry seasons.

To avoid flood damage the family planted the garden on the highest ground they own and built a trench around it. As a result of their foresight, the MMC family was one of the only families to pass through the devastating 2013 flood with a healthy garden. Most other families either experienced serious damage or had their gardens entirely wiped out by the flooding.

Other best practices the family has followed include maintaining a strong fence around their garden to keep animals out, applying organic pesticide regularly to deter bugs, and following a relay planting schedule. Relay planting is the act of timing when you plant different crops to ensure that on any given day a farm or garden is producing food. The MMC family has taken great care to follow this practice and has been rewarded by an uninterrupted source of vegetables for almost a year now.

MMC garden growing corn, Chinese cabbage, marigolds, amaranth, cabbage heads, kale, and lemon grass.

Over the past year the family has experienced a number of benefits from their work on the garden. Vegetables provide nutrients that are critical for good health, especially in children. Children are developing their bodies and minds and the impact of proper nutrition at a young age will affect a child for his/her entire life. The MMC family’s youngest daughter – age six – is an excellent example of this. Since starting the garden she has grown – physically and mentally – much quicker than her peers. Her performance in kindergarten over the past year was so impressive she was admitted to start primary school a year earlier than her peers.

Another benefit the family has enjoyed is additional spending money. The family has earned money by selling extra vegetables and they have saved money because they no longer have to buy vegetables at the market. This additional income and food security has allow the father of the family to seek other income sources. For the past few months he has been working as a laborer on various building projects in the community.

Using the income and savings from their vegetable garden as well as the income from their father’s labor, the family has begun buying supplies to build a new house. The family has agreed that moving out of their stick and mud house is their first priority for improving their lives. So far they have bought 2,000 bricks and two truckloads of stones to begin building a new house.

Bricks the family has bought in preparation for building a new house.

The family also qualified to receive a loan from Tupendane to purchase a water pump. This pump will allow them to irrigate their small farm more efficiently and effectively than ever before. Moving into commercial farming will further increase the family’s income and nutrition. They are confident that this newest venture will significantly speed up their journey on the path out of poverty.

Father of the family (right) with his new pump.

It’s not just the MMC family that is benefitting from their vegetable garden. The community benefitted from a growing experiment the family performed in their garden. Increased food security led the family to feel more comfortable taking a small risk so they decided to plant a bed of butternut squash. The plant grew well and the family became the first to ever harvest it in the Mwereni sub village. They have been showing their neighbors how to plant and cook this tasty vegetable and the vegetable has become very popular.