Ngara, TZ – SODAT Team Making Exciting Progress Vegetable Gardening – 4 Apr 2015

The garden team from SODAT continues to make exciting progress developing their Food Always In The Home (FAITH) organic vegetable gardening program. Currently they are focused on improving the quality of their three existing gardens before they expand the program further. Their focus is paying off.

Garden shop employee Teopista (right) performing a garden mentor visit with Lydia’s son.

The first garden the team built was for Lydia, SODAT’s breakfast program manager. Her garden has been improving as she has learned and implemented best practices with the help of regular mentoring visits from the garden team. Her grandson has shown particular interest in working in the garden. His interest is encouraged by the delicious carrots he has enjoyed harvesting!

The second garden the team built was at Mukibogoye Primary School. Over 1,000 students attend the school. This has helped generate interest by families in expanding the vegetable gardening program. Families are becoming very excited as a result of the garden’s impressive harvests. Over the last two weeks the school harvested 63 kilograms and 57 kilograms. Each week a different class in school is chosen and top performers in the class get to take home vegetables from the garden. The students were especially excited to take home eggplants, which are not commonly grown in Ngara.

As the school garden continues to generate interest in the community, the team is organizing families into groups of three to start gardens together. They are also collecting information to use to design a water delivery service. Many families in Ngara live over a kilometer from the closest water source, making irrigation impossible.

The third garden the SODAT team built was the first family group garden. Three families worked together to start and now maintain a garden. The team is excited about the group model because it gives families an opportunity to learn gardening best practices together and then make an educated decision about whether they want to expand the project or start a garden by themselves.

This family group garden is also starting to become a productive garden. Initially, the family did not do a good job cultivating their land and clearing grasses. They also did not put mulch on their garden. As a result, weeds came back so quickly the vegetables never even had an opportunity to germinate. After some mentoring and shoulder-to-shoulder work with the SODAT garden team, the family learned the importance of mulching and proactive weeding. Now they are starting to enjoy daily vegetables.