Ngara, TZ – SODAT Team Continues to Develop Organic Vegetable Gardening Program – 28 Feb 2015

SODAT Garden Team with Better Lives staff.

Since finishing their training in September, the SODAT Garden Team has been hard at work building their program. Since returning home in October, the team has started a Food Always In The Home (F.A.I.T.H.) organic vegetable garden at Mukibogoye Primary school and has started FAITH gardens at two family homes in the area. They have also continued to make compost and built a very effective nursery that is supplying seedlings for the gardens.

Mukibogoye Primary School students showing off their harvest.

The school garden has become very productive with harvests between 20 kg. and 30 kg. each week. So far the school has harvested Chinese cabbage, kale, mustard seed, and Amaranth. Eggplants, green peppers, carrots, and cassava have also been planted and the students are looking forward to those harvests. Mukibogoye Primary School has over 1,000 students. This means that even with a healthy 30 kg. harvest there is not enough vegetables for every student to get a good serving. Thus, the school is rotating which grade gets to eat the harvest each week. 20 kg. provides a nice serving of vegetables for 200+ students.

Lydia, the SODAT breakfast program manager, was the first person to receive a family garden from the SODAT garden team. In addition to managing the breakfast program Lydia also serves as a mentor to the garden team members. They are always excited to go to “Grandma’s house” to assist with her garden. With assistance from the garden team Lydia has created a very productive family garden. “Every day I come home my grandchildren are excited to see which vegetables they get to eat with dinner,” she explains. Lately they’ve been enjoying a very successful carrot harvest.

The third garden the team opened is for a group of three families. The garden team decided to work with groups of families, instead of individual families, to increase the success rates of gardens. They reasoned that if three families open a garden together they can split the work. Once the group members learn all of the necessary skills and understand the work that is required, they can choose to open individual gardens if they want to.

The new family garden was only opened at the end of January, so the families are still learning and waiting for crops to grow. However, they are enthusiastic about the project and responsive to SODAT’s training.

The garden team has achieved these successes in the face of a number of challenges. The first challenge came right after completing their garden training with Better Lives. The team’s manager left unexpectedly to pursue an education degree. This left the two garden team employees, Sheffon and Teopista, working by themselves without guidance until a new manager was found. The two did remarkably well during this period, staying focused and productive with limited supervision.

Another challenge the team is facing is sourcing all of the materials necessary for sustainable compost making. Because of local livestock raising practices it is difficult to find large quantities of manure. Sheffon has been working with families who raise animals to find affordable manure.

The third, and largest, challenge the team is facing is water supply. Many families in the area have to walk over a kilometer to reach the nearest water source. This makes it impossible to maintain a productive vegetable garden which requires around 24 buckets of water per day in the dry season. For now, the team is focusing on building gardens for families living within 30 meters of a water source. After finding a sustainable water supply system they will be able to spread gardens to other families.

Nursery with shading for seedlings.

The next steps for the garden team are preparing to open another garden for a family group. Before opening a new garden, the team wants all three current gardens to be good example gardens. They are already prepared with compost and seedling, so as soon as they are satisfied with the quality of the existing gardens they can implement another.

Primary school students harvesting.