Families Learning to Garden, Taught How to Turn Produce into Profit

Boksburg SPCA Indigenous Garden Growing Gardening grey water

Photo Credit: Karolina Grabowska via Pexels

130 people have benefitted from the Family Food Garden programme with all learning to turn their produce into small income generating businesses.

Cape Town, South Africa (24 November 2022) – One of the skills many people wished they had learned at school was to grow vegetables. In the hopes of boosting food security, some programmes now help school learners and their parents, grasp the skill of growing food and then so much more!

Greenpop started the Family Food Garden programme to teach people how to grow food in their communities. These skills can then be implemented at home too, where they bring the whole family together to grow food.

The Family Food Garden project, a collaboration between Greenpop and Urban Harvest, aims to provide a solution to this persistent problem. Designed to be both sustainable and scalable, this project supports individuals and groups through an in-person home food gardening workshop, distribution of Family Garden Pods, and 12 months of food gardening training and support via WhatsApp.

The programme is now it its 10th month and everyone is learning to do so much. These families have been truly uplifted!

“October marked the tenth month of Greenpop and Urban Harvest’s Family Food Gardens programme at Christel House in Ottery. This month the participants learned how to promote, package, and sell seedlings, veggies, seeds, preserves, earthworm tea, earthworms, earthworm castings, worm farms, and garden pods.

They also delved a little deeper into how to do market research and find a niche, how to build a brand, how to use social media, and how to make their business resilient. Many of the participants are now established veggie gardeners and seeing their greatly expanded gardens gave us great joy! Thank you to Naked Insurance for making this programme possible.”

While the end of the Christel House programme might be in sight and families have learned skills that will go beyond their own needs, a second project was launched in Langa which is now in its third month.

“October was the third month of Greenpop and Urban Harvest’s Family Food Garden programme for our Langa cohort. Now being proficient in the basics of caring for their gardens and worm farm, the participants were able to explore new and more challenging topics. They took an in-depth look at all the pests that might be found in their gardens and what type of damage they do. They learnt how to make gentle insecticide and how to safely use it. They also started germinating their turnip and spring onion seeds. Finally, they looked at how to harvest seeds from our marigold flowers. Thank you to SAUFFT and the JDC for making this programme possible.”

There are 31 people currently receiving this life-changing training and 121 people who have been fully trained. Along with the training, Greenpop has installed 130 food garden pods. The Family Garden Pod is a compact, self-contained vegetable gardening system that includes a composting worm farm and a vegetable garden.