More than 100 Mombasa urban families are cheaply growing vegetable hills on cement bags, plastic jerry cans, and vertical pipes, enriching their cereals, beans, and fish diets.
Only five per cent of Kenyans eat the the recommended five servings of vegetables and fruit daily. This is according to The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) who further point out that on average Kenyans eat just a third of the required 400 grams of vegetables and fruits daily. This leaves most Kenyans, especially kids, suffering from malnutrition, and susceptible to diseases such as scurvy and night blindness as well as having digestive problems, heart and blood vessel complications as well as having an elevated risk of cancer and depression.
After reading FarmBizAfrica’s many articles on how to set up a vertical kitchen garden in a small space, and learning from a farmer in Thika who had successfully increased his farm yield sixfold using 600 cement bags, Mary Waigumo, an agronomist working with the Bilal Muslim Mission of Kenya centre at Mombasa, took FarmBiz’s lessons to the field to train more than 300 families on how to grow their vegetables in the small spaces that are available to them in towns.
“The vertical gardens met the project’s two missions: reducing the cost of living and providing balanced diets to families in Mombasa. Most of the women and children we trained were eating ugali, some rice, kata shingo as fried omena is referred to at the Coast, beans, and fish most days,” Mary said.
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For the often large Muslim families buying Sh20 worth of sukumawiki would not do. “The daily hustle of buying greens and their relatively high cost vs the much ‘better tasting’ omena or fish or the more filling ugali or beans was a false choice that saw them default to just eating what they knew,” she added.
Since she set up the vertical sack and plastic gardens at the organisation’s offices at Samburu Road, Mombasa Old Town, they have been a hit with the women in Mombasa who mostly often do not have a background in farming.
Sukumawiki, managu, onions, tomatoes, mchicha, kunde, okra, dhania, and capsicums are all grown on the vertical garden sacks. These sacks increase the amount of vegetables that can be produced per square meter by a factor of six compared to traditional on-the-ground farming. These bags which often occupy just a square meter can grow up to 100 plants and ten of them are enough to feed a family of three.
Vertical pipes for their part can grow up to five kilograms of vegetables every week with a 200 mm PVC pipe having more than 16 growing holes.
At Bilal’s centre in Mombasa, would-be farmers also learn how they can conserve the little water they get in rain-scarce Mombasa through the use of mulching and bottle drips, which are both easier to set up on a smaller farm.
After training them on how to establish and maintain vertical vegetable gardens, Waigumo conducts follow-ups to see which women have done the best job. “We encourage them by rewarding them with seeds,” the agronomist informed.
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Of the 300 farmers she has trained, 100 of them have gone to feed their families with vegetables sourced from their pocket-sized vertical gardens with some even producing enough not only for their families but to also sell to their neighbours.
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