Garden Day has been an annual event since 2016 and creates the perfect setting to share the joys of green spaces. This year, the occasion will be a virtual celebration.
Norwood resident and chef Mokgadi Itsweng is an avid lover of gardening. It took her some time to appreciate why her mother regarded her garden as a sacred space, but once she started her own food garden she began to understand.
The value she gained from her own gardening as a young woman made a deep impression. She became a chef and later established two food businesses. She sourced all her fresh fruit and vegetables from small urban farmers and still maintains her own little garden at her townhouse in Norwood.
Itsweng is also supporting the Garden Day movement, which will be celebrated this year across the country on 11 October as a special occasion with a difference.
Her commitment to promoting urban farming has been strengthened by her membership of The Chef’s Manifesto, a global movement of chefs championing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal to end world hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture by 2030.
Itsweng’s food journey began as an eight-year-old when she would help out her grandmother who ran a community food garden with some friends in Pretoria. “My mother also had a beautiful little garden which was her sacred place where she could just be at peace, but I didn’t really understand what it meant to her at the time.”
Her own gardening adventure began when her father bought a farm in Walkerville where he grew vegetables which he sold at markets and to a major fruit and veg retailer. While living on the farm and working as a chef in Rosebank, Itsweng would help by often transporting produce to markets in the early hours.
Then she took the plunge and established her own food garden on part of the farm.
“I learned so much, like the importance of patience and the need to have a consistent presence in the garden, to nurture it. I began to understand why my mom enjoyed her garden. It also became a sacred space for me.”
“I’m usually up early in the morning to tend to the garden and see my son off to school, then it’s a full business day and often a bit more gardening when I get home in the evening.”
Details: The final Garden Day programme will be released on Gardenday.co.za/Events at the start of October.
