Six Excuses for Not Having Kitchen Gardens
First let’s
understand what a kitchen garden is. Kitchen garden is a small area around your
house or in your farm to cultivate especially fruits and vegetables that you
need for your own consumption. Sometimes like the large homesteads there is not
strict separation of spaces but crops for home consumption and the commercial
agriculture share the same resources. Personally I have dabbled with these
kitchen gardens in two ways, first while working on our own kitchen garden and
second while promoting kitchen gardens through social projects.
You can
develop your own kitchen gardens if you have enough interest and physical
capacity in growing your own food. There are three critical things, lack of
which can stop you from developing a kitchen garden. First is space. In a
country like India, where one does not have space sometimes even in rural
habitations, it becomes difficult. Second is water. There are many parts of the
country where even drinking water gets scarce for some months, providing water
to the plants become difficult. Time is the third factor. If you are too tied
up or your work requires you to remain away from your place for very long
periods then it would be difficult. However, where there is a will, there is a
way and you can be innovative enough with all the above mentioned limitations
and work your way around.
Here are
some more lame excuses you can have.
·
It is not economical to grow your own food when
you can buy it easily. I remember having an inferiority complex after
calculating economic value the kitchen gardens were providing in my project
while others were presenting addition of tens of thousands of rupees to a
household through commercial agriculture. There are number of conditions when having
kitchen gardens becomes relevant such as there are no vegetable or fruit supply
chains or there is so much poverty that people cannot afford buying them. There
is also added advantage of getting pesticide free fruits and vegetables which is
a luxury these days. One can remain physically active by working in a kitchen
garden and derive health benefits. All these benefits cannot be measured in
monetary terms however.
·
Many times, there is a difference in what you
can grow and what you are accustomed to eat. Food habits of the people have
changed drastically. Many of the times the produce comes from distant places
and you cannot grow these things in your own region. In our Ratnagiri district,
the traditional crop of lesser yams is steadily getting out of cultivation with
even rural folks having got habituated to eat potatoes which cannot be grown
locally. Say if somebody grows 20 kg of lesser yams, which is equivalent of 20
kg of potatoes bought from the market. Just because one does not know what to
do with these lesser yams, they would lie there and the grower would get de-motivated
afterwards.
·
There is lack of appropriate seeds, equipments
and the materials for growing kitchen gardens. I remember visiting a village level
small retail market in the heart of vegetable growing belt in Nashik. Most of
the sellers as well as customers were vegetable farmers from the same area. The
reason for this was pretty interesting. Every farmer was cultivating one single
crop for the market. So a farmer with a large crop of cabbage was not having
beans. Further probe lead to an interesting finding that local shops were not
keeping small kitchen garden seed packets and most of the seeds being hybrids could
not be continued in the next season by the farmers on their own.
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