Nutrition Gardens
Participatory rural appraisal and household needs assessment in the project villages indicated a need to improve the nutritional security of the local Adivasi communities. Nutrition gardens being an underrated but effective way of adding vital nutrients to the impoverished food basket, members of the project’s women’s groups were encouraged to take up nutrition gardening in their backyards and improve existing nutrition gardens in the pre-monsoon and monsoon seasons. Subsequently, they received training on nutrition gardening with natural farming methods including sack cultivation, simple rainwater harvesting techniques using pits and ditches, and organic pesticides and manure. The first climate-resilient intervention promoted by the project, it yielded a variety of crops such as bitter gourd, snake gourd, wax gourd, bottle gourd, taro, okra, cucumber, papaya, red potato, moringa, spinach, and green amaranth.
Members of women’s self-help groups in Sandeshkhali I, Hingalganj, Kakdwip and Kultali blocks have raised their own nutrition gardens. In the videos, some of them from Kakdwip and Kultali discuss how they used the learnings from the training sessions and seeds provided by the project team for nutrition gardening to raise their own vegetable patches for the first time, using organic pesticides and manure. A variety of green and leafy vegetables, including bitter gourd, snake gourd, wax gourd, bottle gourd, taro, okra, cucumber, papaya, pumpkin, red potato, moringa, spinach, and amaranth, can be seen in the videos. As the women report that they use the vegetables exclusively for household consumption, they also about the superior taste of the vegetables and the money they are saving now that they no longer need to purchase vegetables from the market. Some say that even their neighbours who did not previously raise nutrition gardens have expressed an interest in learning the techniques from them and taking up the practice.
