[TECH] Home garden technology leaflet 2

Home garden technology leaflet 2: Planning improvements to the home garden

Every home garden can be improved to fulfill your family's needs better. A well-planned and well-tended home garden can provide nutritious food, income, medicines, seeds and seedlings for the family's other land areas. At the same time, it will be a beautiful place to live in. To improve your home garden, you need to know four things:

- what your home garden produces now;
- what you would like your home garden to produce in future;
- how you can improve your home garden;
- what inputs are needed.

STEP 1: KNOW YOUR HOME GARDEN

Make sure you have a good idea of the structure and main functions of your home garden. A map of your home garden will help you and others assisting you to visualize exactly what your home garden is and what it can do (making a home garden map is described in Home Garden Technology Leaflet 1).

STEP 2: SET OBJECTIVES

Make a list of the main things you want your home garden to produce. You should also identify the major constraints you need to overcome, such as wild pigs, poor soil or sloping land. Some examples of objectives are listed in Table I. Keep your list simple at first; you can add to it later.

TABLE 1

Examples of home garden objectives

Provide daily nutritional needs for the family

Provide more income

Increase food production

Diversity food production

Make the garden easy to care for

Provide a place for farm animals

Keep out pests

Reduce weeding

Provide a nursery for estate crop's

Make use of all area available

Planning improvements and changes to your home garden requires some thinking. Deciding what you want to do depends on your situation, such as soil type, sloping land, and how much time and money you have available. Your wife or husband and maybe a friend should participate in the planning. Also ask your agricultural extension agent for technical advice to help you make the right decisions.

STEP 3: SELECT TECHNOLOGY OPTIONS

Choose those technology options in Table 2 that meet your needs and situation. Note that you can choose either a single technology option or a combination of several options, depending on the type of land and resources that you have.

Using the home garden map, identify where the technology options should be located. The technology options sometimes overlap, for example Living fences (Home Garden Technology Leaflet 10) are useful around an Intensive Vegetable Square (Home Garden Technology Leaflet 12). Walk around the home garden with the map and try to imagine how the technology options you have selected will fit together into a system.

TABLE 2

Technology options in the Home Garden Technology Leaflets

Leaflet number	Technology option	Leaflet number	Technology option
3	Growing plants for daily nutrition	10	Living fences
4	Planting crops for a continuous food supply	11	Multiple cropping
5	Soil improvement	12	Intensive vegetable square
6	Use of sloping land	13	Multilayer cropping
7	Cover cropping	14	Growing fruit- and nut- trees
8	Using wetland	15	Home garden nursery
9	Safe and effective crop protection

Each of these technology options are briefly described in the respective leaflets, and you can probably recognize many of them in the home gardens and farmed land of your village. For more detailed information and advice, ask your agricultural extension agent or a neighbour who has a well-developed home garden.

Use the map as a vision of the garden you want to create. Everyone who works in the garden, including advisers, should refer to the map. In this way it is easier to ensure that each step in the completion of the garden is thought about, discussed and understood.

Figure 1 Example of home garden map with different technology options