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As the name suggests the garden is located right next to your home. In our context, a home garden will produce varieties of vegetables, herbs, spices, flowers, and fruits with minimal or no external input. Out of many existing names like kitchen garden, nutrition garden, etc. we preferred “home garden” for two reasons:
1. We want to emphasize on the home consumption of the produce.
2. We believe in this common phrase “home is where the heart is”. We all want to live in beautiful homes. So, we want to create gardens that not only produce the food, but which will look aesthetically appealing too. This beautiful landscape will help the inhabitants of the home to connect with their land and give them a sense of pride to create such spaces.
In our definition a home garden must have these:
1. Produce at least 20 different kinds of food.
2. Producing food around the year.
3. It will produce 200gm food daily on an average.
4. Seeds must be kept at home or locally source for growing.
5. No poison added of any form.
6. Primarily focus of the garden is home consumption.
We are in the middle of a climate crisis. Our dependence on input-intensive farming which destroys our environment is contributing to this crisis even more. Combined with these factors an over-emphasis on farming of few crops is threatening our food security. Moreover, science shows that these changing farming practices over the last few decades have reduced the nutrition in our food drastically! So, we are not only food insecure but malnourished and nutrition insecure too.
It is often argued population boom is contributing to food insecurity heavily as the land is getting scarce for per capita food production. However, we will argue otherwise, i.e., it is not how many we are but what we do with our land that matters! From history and even from contemporary times we find many examples where we see humans have successfully tended their land working nature. Through that, they have produced an abundance of food in and around their surroundings. Small spaces can be extremely productive with effective planning and efficient management. Home gardens will add buffers to the demand for food and meet the nutritional need of the families. More importantly, these spaces will provide microclimates to help the local ecosystem thrive.