Gardens for Health

container gardens, cultivated chaos

2010-01-10T13:40:00.002+01:00

A few months ago, we gave this family in Kigali some seeds and seedlings to begin a home garden. They had a small space for a garden, but the soil was poor, so they’ve filled it with containers—old jerrycans, cracked wash bins, thrown away tires. They’ve saved seeds, found more, inspired the neighbors. Previously empty, it is now overflowing with vegetative chaos.

…to a new year full of good growth and good health

2010-01-02T19:30:00.005+01:00

2009 was a good year for us. We learned a lot from our partner cooperatives on the ground and revaluated and reworked our approach. We awarded loans to our cooperatives for their community gardens, we provided seeds and tree seedlings for hundreds more home gardens in Rwanda, and we’ve positioned ourselves to expand in the country. We were awarded the Echoing Green Fellowship, and we won some awesome funding through the Dell Social Innovation Competition and the JP Morgan Give-it-Away Competition. We also all officially graduated from school, so we are no longer squeezing grant applications in the middle of term papers, with the exception of Emily--who will still be editing our grant applications in the middle of dissecting cadavers.

So here’s to a new year, full of good growth and good health to all! (And here’s too, to a new year full of more frequent updates from the field.)

-Julie

Cultivating nutritionists

2009-06-18T14:56:00.012+02:00

This week some elected members of our cooperatives were trained by our nutritionist as well as a nutritionist from the Kigali University Central Hospital on nutrition and HIV/AIDS, and managing symptoms using nutrition. They will be assigned to follow vulnerable households, particularly to monitor the adherence of those on antiretroviral treatment. They were a great group, many of them already local community health workers.

The last day was certainly the most enjoyable, when everyone separated into groups and were assigned to make different meals, utilizing produce from the demonstration garden.

One group focused on making their own sosma. SOMA, or corn-soy blend (CSB) is the famous food aid given by the World Food Program. It's maize and soy flour plus a mix of vitamins and minerals. A very common breakfast in Rwanda is sorghum porridge, and the flour is very cheap. Premixed storebought SOSOMA (sorghum+soy+maize) is triple the price at 1,200 RWF ($2.10) per kilo. Mixing your own 'sosoma' can constitue a more nutritious porridge than sorghum, but less expensive than factory mixed SOSOMA .

Also highlighted in the cooking demonstrations was moringa, the leaves of which can be cooked, or the more concentrated leaf powder can be mixed into porridge or sauces, or potatoes or beans. It’s an excellent nutritional supplement, but more importantly it is a locally available multi-vitamin--the trees grow well in almost every condition.

Attacking hunger at its roots?

2009-06-12T22:22:00.006+02:00

The effects of chronic hunger cannot be overstated. Hunger is not only a physical condition, it is a drain on economic development, a threat to global security, a barrier to health and education, and a trap for the millions of people worldwide who work from sunup to sundown every single day but can barely produce enough food to sustain their lives and the lives of their families.

Most of all, hunger belies our planet’s bounty. It challenges our common humanity and resolve. We do have the resources to give every person in the world the tools they need to feed themselves and their children.

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, on the day she awarded the World Food Prize to Dr. Gebisa Ejeta, recognized for developing sorghum hybrids resistant to drought and striga weed. The political commitment to "fight hunger" in her comments, and also the recent release by the state department, "One Table: Advancing Agriculture to Fight Hunger" is admirable and certainly necessary. Both acts highlight improving access to seeds, fertilizers, and irrigation tools, as well as increasing trade for small-scale farmers, and supporting agriculture for women and families.

Certainly the farmers that we support in Rwanda (the majority of whom are women) would appreciate inputs such as appropriate irrigation technology and fertilizer--organic, that is--that can help them achieve increased yields from their community gardens, which would produce more food to be shared for their families and even a surplus to sell at local markets. They would also appreciate improved seed varieties that are resistant to pests and diseases and drought. They would also appreciate seeds that they could save instead of relying on varieties they have to repurchase season after season.

There are many questions that these comments raise. One in particular is the assumption that increasing agricultural yields translates into an eradication of hunger—a tenuous link. While socio-economic status and nutritional status can be associated, we cannot necessarily assume that helping farmers improve their maize yield (particularly due to the untenable ways we may ‘help’ them increase their yield) will necessarily help them "feed themselves and their children." The challenges of hunger and nutrition are not just about the challenges of agricultural yields.

While vulnerable to food insecurity, Rwanda, for example, produces enough kilocalories to feed its population by pure standards of yield--due apparently to fertilizer subsidies, distribution of seeds, and moves towards some commercial scale farming. But yet 43% of child deaths in the country are due to malnutrition, recently prompting the government to enter into an emergency malnutrition plan.

Quantity does not mean quality, and while hunger is not not just about yield, malnutrition is certainly not. Notice the ubiquitous use of the word “hunger” in Secretary Clinton’s the comments, while the words “malnutrition” or “undernutrition” are conspicuously absent.

Maybe what’s most consoling about the state department’s comments are their acknowledged humility and tone of inclusiveness—characteristic of the Obama administration, and a possible nod to food sovereignty.

“We do not have all the answers. But, we know that ownership and ingenuity are key ingredients to building long-term agriculture systems that reduce hunger and spur economic growth. We intend to learn and adapt as we go. In the spirit of partnership central to this effort, we will listen to all voices – from rural farmers, to chambers of commerce, to government and other leaders.”

We hope that agricultural policy will truly be guided by this sense of caution as well as commitment, that we keep in mind that the goal is to provide healthy, sustainable food for people everywhere, and that we do not reproduce some of the mistakes in food production and consumption that developing countries have made.

Grow your own sack garden for health

2009-06-07T14:53:00.011+02:00

Rwanda is the most densely populated country in sub-Saharan Africa, this population density and land scarcity a related cause of malnutrition. Some of our members live around Kigali city, where they have little or no land at all to grow their own food. Some of them are even reluctant to invest in a garden because of a fear of inevitable expropriation, a result of the somewhat problematic Kigali City Master Plan. Planting a garden is an act in settling--why invest in planting a carrot and using precious resources to water it, when you’re not sure if you’ll see it harvested?

Sack gardens have become immensely popular especially among members living in urban areas. Our agronomists first learned about sack gardens from Manor House Agricultural Centre in Kenya, and we learned more about various sacks and container and urban gardening methods at ECHO Global Farm.

Sack gardens are ideally suited to urban areas and contaminated soil, and certainly have wider relevance beyond our own work. So here's a quick picture tutorial.

Materials needed: a sack—burlap or plastic, soil mixed with organic compost, rocks for irrigation, and a cylindrical open bucket or tin.

We find that discarded food aid sacks make especially good sack gardens, if especially for symbolic reasons.

Fill the bottom sack with soil mixed with organic compost. Using a cyclindrical tin (we use seed tins or vegetable oil tins) fill the tin with rocks. This will serve as an irrigation channel.

Surround the tin with more soil, and slowly lift it up, so that the rocks remain.

Fill the tin with more rocks, and surround it again with soil.And so forth, until the sack is filled with a tower of rocks surrounded by soil.

Poke holes into the side of the sack, at an even distance apart.

Transplant seedlings into the sides of the sack. Here, amaranth transplanted; cabbages also work well.

You can try direct seeding beets or carrots in the top of the sack.

Harvest Time

Taking the Initiative

2009-06-06T07:25:00.009+02:00

How else could our updates begin but with some sort of feel good anecdote about our work?

One part of our program is helping set up home gardens, or kitchen gardens, jardins potagers, or akarima kigikoni, etc. Almost every household, particularly outside Kigali, grows some, or all, of their own food. But small subsistence plots are often filled with single crops--beans, bananas, maize, potatoes. There is very little diversity, whether due to limited access to other seeds, or their prohibitive cost, or lack of knowledge about their nutritional importance for the family—all issues cited by our members. Promoting kitchen gardens in every home has become part of Rwanda’s national policy to transform the agricultural sector and eradicate malnutrition; this sort of political commitment to promote gardening in health centers, schools, and households, is very exciting. It’s not just the White House or Buckingham Palace, but Village Urugwiro too.

We provide a variety of vegetable seeds, orange flesh sweet potatoes, fruit tree seedlings like avocado, tamarillo, and papaya, a moringa tree and sacks for sack gardens. The agronomists hold trainings on biointensive techniques and coordinate distribution of seeds and tree seedlings. We’ve found that this initial bit of support often serves as a catalyst. A return visit to houses that began with the four sack gardens we helped them set up, often now have fifteen, old jerry cans are transformed into container gardens, and neighbors follow suit. Home gardens don’t usually provide for all a family’s needs, but they are nutrition-within-reach, especially important with the loss of productive labor experienced by a household affected by HIV/AIDS.

Concorde's home

Today, on a visit with the agronomists to see cooperative community gardens east of Kigali, where tiny houses dot the soaring hills, we stopped over at a cooperative leader’s house to deliver greetings and see his home garden. The small few feet in front of the home that Concorde shares with his family had held a dwindling yield of maize for the last nineteen of twenty years. This year the same small plot is filled with mix of vegetables in double dug beds, lined with young fruit tree seedlings, a moringa tree and banana trees. He also planted a neem tree and tephrosia plant to manage pests. And he is trying to grow a vanilla plant for the first time. Concorde said that before, his family of five rarely ate vegetables, their meals the usual mixture of maize, sweet potatoes, cassava, beans. Before, he says he also never associated what he ate with his ability to tolerate his antiretroviral medication, but that now he feels much stronger and more capable.

One of the mound gardens Concorde constructed, thriving in the dry season

Behind his house, and next to the hutch for rabbits that he just built, which supply a reliable and quickly renewing source of protein—and fertilizer—are two mound gardens filled with cabbages and onions. Having to walk three kilometers every day for water became too tiring for him and his wife, so he built a simple rain collection tank behind his house, to catch water during the rainy season. His compost pile is surrounded by trellises and climbing passion fruit vines. He just built two bee hives, with plans to build ten. And on and on. What living with HIV has taught him, he says, is that he must do everything closer to home.

Passion fruit vines shading the compost pile

It might be easy to fall into a before-and-after narrative, but with change as visible as a dwindling maize plot transformed into a thriving and diverse garden, it’s pretty hard to avoid. What’s inspiring about Concorde is clearly his own resourcefulness and initiative. But he claims that as an elected leader of his cooperative, he feels a certain sense of responsibility and obligation to demonstrate such initiative and to truly model what it means to live well with this disease.

In front of his rabbit hutch

And certainly, it is only appropriate that our first post end with a place where you can directly contribute.

Support a home garden for a family like Concorde’s through The Hunger Site or directly on our own website.

2009-06-01T14:00:00.007+02:00

Greetings Friends and Readers!

We begin this with an attempt to keep you better updated about our tangible progress in Rwanda, and to provide commentary or news on what we find relevant in the fields of agriculture, food, health and HIV/AIDS, where our work intersects.

The Gardens for Health Team