Community Gardening and Tree Production

I assist gardeners in my village on all vegetable and tree production activities throughout the year. I have loosely organized a preexisting women’s group to exchange knowledge via an ‘expert’ system. Each woman has chosen or been assigned a ‘specialty’ on which I have arranged they attend an outside training on, I have trained them, or they already knew on their own. They are then responsible for helping other women in the group understand and implement this area of expertise in their gardens. Many garden spaces are shared so this exchange sometimes happens naturally. Two of my most successful experts are in the creation of tree nursery creation and out-planting, and in the creation of neem oil and other organic solutions for pest control. On their own they have taken to helping other gardeners in the village implement this. 

I assist three individual male gardeners (there is no male gardening group) in their backyard gardens. I answer questions and help them with everything from seeding their nursery until storage and selection methods for their vegetable seeds at the end of the season. I am currently helping one work partner with a hectare of watermelon. I have assisted in the process from seed selection,     

                                                                                                                  seeding fertility management, pest control, and harvest. I help these gardeners identify pests and disease and offer possible solutions to their problems.

When tree seeds are ripe I bring farmers to the forest for field trips to collect seed pods and teach them the appropriate selection and storage methods for various species. I have educated them on the agroforestry applications for these tree species. I do not tend to hold large trainings (except for one in field crop seed storage techniques ), I simply monitor the work of my close partners and assist any community member who asks for advice. My village is small (about 200 people) so I prefer a more intimate one-on-one approach to gardening knowledge extension.

In my personal garden space I conduct an informal ‘kid’s gardening club’ where I have a group of children assist with simple activities like filling tree nursery sacks and gathering materials for compost. I utilize my personal garden space to demonstrate practices such as double digging, compost creation, fruit trees, small water storage earthworks landscape modifications, dead mulch, and live mulch.