Container Gardens Provide Fresh Vegetables for City Dwellers

Backgrounder

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, you and I – in fact every person – should eat 300 grams of fresh vegetables every day to stay healthy. Three hundred grams is about one large bowl full of vegetables.

With this in mind, a municipality in Cuba developed a program for residents to grow their own vegetables in urban areas. Rubén Luis Hernández, who is a member of the Farm Radio Network, told us about this program. He is an agronomist in Sancti Spíritus, the municipality where this program helps to feed people. The local government in Sancti Spíritus planned to use every empty space available to grow food. There were plenty of vacant lots and unused spaces but many of them were paved over with concrete. Or the soil was not fertile.

The question was, how could they make these spaces usable to grow food? Here’s what they decided. To make the spaces usable, the city planners built containers from bricks, cement blocks, wood, large rocks, and metal scraps – anything they could find. All of the materials were inexpensive and available close to the growing site.

In total, the city built 26,000 square metres of growing containers. That is about the size of two and a half soccer fields! Many of these containers were rented out to city residents at a low cost – just a few cents per square metre. The residents planted lettuce, leeks, radishes, cabbage, carrots, chard, peppers, garlic, onions and beets. After the first season they harvested 15 to 18 kilograms of vegetables per square metre – a very good yield! Today the yields are more than 20 kilograms per square metre.

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Let’s talk about the growing containers for a minute. Or really I should say, let’s talk about what goes in them. This is one of the most important things to know. The containers are filled with a mixture of soil and organic material. They use half soil and half organic material. This is a high proportion of organic material. The organic material is made up mostly of sugar cane leftovers and chicken manure. There is also a small amount of cow and horse manure mixed in. But the most useful thing is the sugar cane waste. This is because sugar cane is widely grown and processed in Cuba so it is easy to get and inexpensive.

[NOTE TO BROADCASTER: IF POSSIBLE, SUGGEST A LOCAL SUBSTITUTE FOR SUGAR CANE. CONSULT AN AGRICULTURE EXPERT IN YOUR AREA TO HELP YOU MAKE THIS SCRIPT MORE PRACTICAL FOR YOUR AUDIENCE.] The soil mixture is so fertile that residents are able to grow and harvest vegetables for two or three seasons without adding any fertilizer.

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At harvest time, the growers sell their vegetables at prices they decide, based on local supply and demand. This system stimulates the local economy and the production of fresh vegetables in the city. And the program provides jobs for many people who need work, especially women.

This is a good project for cities and towns where there is a lot of unused space available – space that is either paved with concrete or doesn’t have fertile soils.