WATCH: Vegetable garden project empowers learners

The Reiger Park-based ATKV-Branch Pot Pap has, in partnership with Seed 2 Harvest, recently transformed a portion of the schoolyard at Lakeside Primary School into a vegetable garden.

According to Audrey Eustace (ATKV), apart from producing food for the school, the underlying significance of the garden project is to empower learners with the skills they need to produce food, start their gardens at home or subsistence farming, and perhaps subsequently give birth to future commercial farmers.

The team from Seed 2 Harvest actively helped the school team by taking turns to till the land, build raised garden beds, sow seedlings and hold a workshop where they taught the participants the different ways of how to grow and raise vegetables.

The children will henceforth be responsible for maintaining the vegetable garden, under the supervision of staff.
The vegetables harvested will in turn be used to feed the school’s children.
The school management said it believes the vegetable garden will introduce learners to agriculture and help ignite some interest in farming.

Eustace said much poverty in and around the school was one of the reasons they pioneered the garden project.
She expressed her gratitude for the gardening interest shown by the staff and children at the school.

Seed 2 Seed’s Shaun Cairns said his organisation has discovered that young people have lost touch with where the food they eat comes from. Hence they establish their organisation to promote agriculture in schools.
“The average age of a farmer today is around 65 years old and that needs to be lowered. So, this is the greatest opportunity to spark the interest of learners into growing of vegetables and doing their own food garden at home.”

Cairns encouraged other schools and organisations to do likewise by creating vegetable gardens on the piece of land in their premises.

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