Garden Towers Begin To Produce!

Five weeks since our beneficiary communities established their garden towers with funding from Kwanda, it is a delight to report that they are now harvesting fresh vegetable produce! At the Wamunyu special school, the students, led by their teacher, Mr Henry, harvested kale and spinach for their dinner at school. Being a boarding school, the garden towers are offering a cheap supply of nutrition to the students. The gardens have also been harvested at the Kenya Connect Resource Center, and the vegetables are served as lunch for the staff. At the individual homesteads, the gardens provide healthy vegetables to the families, with some selling the excess to earn some income.

On average, each garden tower has about 75 plants of both kale and spinach. Each garden tower is watered with an average of 10 litres daily.

At some homesteads, the beneficiaries have faced a challenge of chickens eating the vegetables but they have since innovated by providing either an enclosure of gunny bags, old mosquito netting or even thorny bushes around the gardens. The vegetables are organically grown using organic compost. The project aims to promote food security, empower women through agricultural entrepreneurship, and encourage environment-friendly farming practices.

One of the project beneficiaries, Joyce, commented:

The tower gardens have transformed the way we approach food production. I never knew I could produce my own vegetables in a small piece of land during the dry season using low quantities of water. Not only do the gardens provide my family with fresh vegetables, but they also empower us as women to contribute to our household's well-being.

The locals continue to be very grateful to Kwanda as they reap the benefits of the garden tower technology.