School Vegetable Garden Project – Part I

Objective:

 “To develop a school vegetable garden at Samooham HS N Paravur. This garden will supply vegetables, which can be used in children’s mid-day meal throughout the academic year thereby providing necessary nutrients to the children.”

Introduction

N.Parur is a hamlet in the Ernakulam district,. It comes under Parur municipality. It has 24wards and my school resides in ward 11 which has 300 households with a population of around1000 . The population is predominantly backward caste. Our school has 500 students with 30 staff.

Present situation

Afternoon meal is provided to the children through the mid-day meal scheme. According to the present provisions rice, dal and vegetables are provided by the government but eggs and vegetables are bought locally from the market.

Due to various reasons such as insufficient funds allocated per student for each commodity by the government, transport and storage issues, the children are often not provided vegetables in their mid-day meal. The only vegetable that is served now is pumpkin and even that is served only thrice a week.

It is impractical to buy vegetables daily due to shortage of availibilty.. Another issue is that the village itself doesn’t grow vegetables in a commercial scale. Whatever vegetables an individual family grows is just enough for their daily consumption.

Due to the unavailability of vegetables, children are robbed of vital micro nutrients that are needed for one’s physical and mental growth.

Solution

To tackle this issue a solution is proposed in the form of a school vegetable garden on the vacant land adjacent to the school. The goal of the project is that this vegetable garden will supply vegetables to the children throughout the academic year. The diagram below shows the plan of the school and the site of the proposed vegetable garden.

For a month we need 37 kg of vegetables to satisfy the vegetable needs of the school.

The idea is to see that at least 30kg per month is supplied from the school vegetable garden by employing good gardening practices. The types of vegetables and fruits that will be grown are papaya, drum stick, banana, brinjal, ladies finger, radish, pumpkin, chilli, carrot, tomato and spinach. This list was arrived to after discussing with students.

Stakeholders

The stake holders involved in this project are students, school teacher and the school management committee (SMC).The technical guidance, seeds and other inputs like organic fertilizers and pesticides will be provide.

SMC consists of 12 members – 1 head master, , 5 2 teachers,1non-teaching staff 5guardians (i.e.PTA ) and 1 student representative.

Important steps involved in the project

• Construction of temporary bamboo fence around the school ( depicted as a green outline the school diagram)
• Land and Soil preparation
• Sowing seeds
• Construction of permanent fence ( barbed wire fence) once the vegetable garden is ready for plucking.

Community participation and teacher involvement at all stages of the project is important to make this project successful. But according to me if students can develop a sense of ownership and attachment with the garden it will go a long way in sustaining the garden.