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Kenya: Urban Gardening Taking Root

Categories: Sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya, Environment, Food, Health, Ideas

In Kenya, city dwellers are learning different techniques to grow food for consumption and sale even in reduced spaces. For people with low or no income, urban gardening may be the key to food security. These videos show how food can be grown in containers and using limited space and resources.

From the Mammut Film Production documentary God save the green [1] by Michele Mellara and Alessandro Rossi comes this short segment on the bag gardens that are enabling urban gardeners in Nairobi to grow enough leafy greens for a family of six on one square meter, by going vertical:

Be a Blessing Today [2]has uploaded a series of videos that teach different urban farming techniques from his garden in Kenya. One of the is the previously seen bag method [3], with certain improvements that make watering easier:

Two other methods taught by Be a Blessing are the raised bed walls [4] and stairway farming [5], both ways to readapt spaces for easier gardening, by creating raised beds that don't require bending down to harvest and plant, and by enabling planting over concrete areas.

Other techniques which are useful for people growing food in limited spaces are shared by other people on YouTube from different parts of the world. For example, this is a great way to use up discarded plastic water bottles to grow food on a vertical garden:

This one [6]grows plants both on the top and bottom from a plastic container made from a discarded large water bottle:

This other video [7] shows us ways in which discarded tires can also be used as containers for gardens:

Seedling image is by Chrisseee on Flickr [8], with a Creative Commons Attribution License [9].