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Agriculture
To improve the food and economic security of urban households affected by the January 2010 earthquake, CEDDISEC, with support from Episcopal Relief & Development, has launched a program to promote kitchen gardens, which in Creole are called Jardins prè-Kay.
CEDDISEC’s agriculture objectives are:
- To facilitate people’s access to the resources (i.e., techniques, seeds and tools) necessary to create small kitchen gardens that do not depend upon their access to expansive or traditional plots of agricultural land.
- To share opportunities for experiential and technical learning that will enable people to engage in vegetable production and grow a variety of vegetables year-round.
CEDDISEC’s kitchen garden program seeks to enable families to produce a variety of vegetables for both consumption and sale, thus improving household food availability and finances. Kitchen gardens are versatile in both their structure and size, thus enabling families to create productive gardens inside of old tires, grain sacks, half-barrels, etc., and within very confined spaces. At the same time, by applying the appropriate techniques, kitchen gardens can be cultivated year-round, regardless of the season.
Using an experiential learning method, CEDDISEC assists families not familiar with vegetable production to work together to build “group-wide” nurseries in a location loaned by one of the participating families. From the nurseries, families transplant vegetable plants to their individual kitchen garden structures. In addition to sharing new techniques, CEDDISEC assists these groups with start-up seeds and horticulture tools (e.g., insecticide sprayers, small picks, transplanting shovels and water cans). Based the recommendations of participating families, the types of vegetables being grown include cabbage, eggplant, tomatoes, onions, spinach, chili peppers, bell peppers, carrots, okra and cauliflower.
Phase III
Beginning in June 2011, CEDDISEC Agriculture Manager Salomon Oscar and his team of five (one Agronomist, three Development Agents, and one University Intern) began a series of two-day technical and experiential workshops for families from urban communities in Carrefour, Gressier, Léogâne (Matthieu & Darbonne), Tabarre and Croix-des-Bouquets. Since these practical sessions, an estimated 365 families have became engaged in building vegetable nurseries and constructing kitchen garden structures from locally-available materials.
Phase III: 2012
In 2012, CEDDISEC plans to expand its kitchen garden to reach an additional 300 families, as well as continue its support for the 365 families in the 2011 program as they form new community agricultural associations.
