Terms of Reference for Development of Case Study

On Kitchen Gardening

Name: Aishwarya Baral

Roll:UR16005

A kitchen garden is an integrated system which comprises the family house, a recreational
area and a garden producing a variety of foods including vegetables, fruits and medicinal
plants for home consumption or sale. The kitchen gardens have been found to play an
important role in improving food security for the resource poor rural households in
developing country like India.

Tribal people lack sufficient incomes to meet their food and nutritional demands adequately.
An alternative way of improving their food supply is practicing kitchen garden farming. Even
very poor, landless or near landless people practice gardening on small patches of homestead
land, vacant lots, roadsides or edges of a field, or in containers. Gardening may be done with
virtually no economic resources, using locally available planting materials, green manures,
live fencing and indigenous methods of pest control. Thus, home gardening at some level is
a production system that the poor can easily enter.

But the objective of our project is to provide technical assistance to make kitchen garden
nutrition sensitive, so we will be focusing on Nutritional Diversity that refers to a diet that
focused on the diversity of the food consumption to maintain overall health and vitality. A
human diet requires at least 51 nutrients in adequate amounts consistently for good health.
The garden quickily gave the workers a new form of self-efficassy.
A family's nutritional well-being depends on adequate food supplies. Poor diets and
inadequate food intake are not always the result of a lack of food or of money to buy food.
Developing the home garden for food production is a very important part of attaining an
adequate food supply for the household. There are several reasons why this is so. One reason
is the isolation of many rural villages. Food from other areas must sometimes be transported
from far away so are either expensive to buy in the village or are not available. Opportunities
for earning income are also limited in a number of villages.
Possible outcome:
Beneficiaries can learn how to establish home gardens in their home backyard and get
good organically cultivated indigenous varieties of vegetables for home consumption.
Knowledge about seed production can be improved. Villagers will follow cultivation
standards, processes and method to store vegetable seeds for use in the next season.
Method of cultivation and use for common ailments can be taught to farmers through
trainings.
Awareness will be raised among beneficiaries on the use of medicinal plants leading
to reduction in medical expenses.
Farmers can use these herbs in the treatment of their cattle. For example, Aloe has
been used for cattle which were weak and had certain types of digestive problems.
Apart from all the above mentioned outcomes, kitchen gardens can contribute to
conserve the local indigenous varieties of vegetables and greens and this serve as a
local gene pool and micro conservation centres.

The home garden, if large enough, has the potential to supply most of the non-staple foods
and some of the staple foods (e.g. roots and tubers etc) that a family needs each day of the
year. In every village there are examples of home gardens which are managed well. These
home gardens produce a wide variety of food crops which supply the family throughout the
year with fruits and vegetables, some meat and fish, legumes, spices, medicines, etc. The
home garden is the major supplier of daily food. Agricultural products and brick are also to
purchase food and other items that cannot be produced in the garden. The combination of
foods from crops, livestock and fish gives a good diet in terms of energy, protein and
micronutrients.

So our approach will be-

1. To understand how the Kitchen gardens were set up
2. To find out how effective the kitchen gardens are in addressing food security
3. To find how the kitchen gardens have influenced Nutritional diversity to the villagers
4. To establish the challenges faced by the kitchen gardens and what can be done to
overcome them