National Gardening Week

As this week is National Gardening Week, The Sreepur Village would like to highlight the training they offer so that over 200 mothers, in the future, can live self-sufficiently, confidently knowing that their children will not starve.

For the three meals a day that The Sreepur Village provides, a small piece of farm land in the village has been partitioned into different sections for growing vegetables, which provides 60% of the daily vegetables that feed our mothers and children. For the remaining 40% fresh vegetables are bought directly from the local market.

We also offer direct homestead gardening training for our mothers and just last year, we started sack gardening. As the greater part of our mothers is from flood-prone northern and eastern regions of Bangladesh, and as the majority lack nutrition awareness, our sack gardening programme helps them to meet their nutritional needs for their children throughout the year and in times of natural disaster.

Research has shown that 8 – 10 rice sacks of grown vegetables can feed a family of four as well as reduce the family’s monthly food expenditure. At the same time, we incorporate the literacy training with the gardening, so our mothers are able to learn the appropriate vocabulary and communicate in this practical field.

In Bangladesh, TDH (Terre de Hommes) is building raised vegetable gardens, which are more resistant to the country’s frequent floods and bad weather. This approach aims at encouraging more continuous food production and reducing malnutrition in children and mothers.

A few months ago we also started this “Key Hole Gardening”, which we hope our mothers, when they leave The Sreepur Village, will take to their communities so that they have a continuous form of food security and can properly meet the nutritional needs for all the family.