Anjali Watson Views & Interviews 21 June 2009 390 views No Comment  Print This Post  Email This Post

A home garden is essentially the small scale planting, within an individual family’s land, of economically and/or culturally important plants, be they trees, shrubs, vines, herbs and/or spices. The main purpose of the garden is to provide food and medicines to the family, as well as fuel and fertilizer in the form of compost. Increasingly home gardens have become expanded to include products such as timber or tea that are expressly grown for additional income. The gardens tend to be structured in such a way as to mimic natural forest and contain over-story fruit and timber trees which are under-planted with medicinal shrubs and spice bushes.

Sri Lanka is widely credited with the widespread innovation of home gardens centuries ago, and it is thus fitting that this ancient system of agro-forestry should be encouraged to proliferate in a post-tsunami context. There has been a spate of projects, implemented after the tsunami aimed at the restoration and diversification of livelihoods. Most of these have been well-intentioned and many successful, and all have been directed towards the empowerment of communities with the goal they will be better equipped to withstand future disasters, disruptions and hardships. As food security is perhaps the most basic of requirements for productivity, it makes sense that the traditional home garden be fostered where it is common and even introduced where it is not. In combination with paddy and/or chena, home gardens can provision individual families with their day to day requirements. Furthermore, when the vagaries of climate, such as floods or droughts, see to the failure of these staple crops, home gardens provide a nutritional buffer which requires no hard currency to procure. The sale of surplus garden products can generate additional income as can the small scale propagation of strictly commercial species, which allows access to a larger market. Another vital element inherent in the home garden system is the conservation of seed diversity. In a world moving more and more towards a forced reliance by farmers on multi-national companies and their monopolized (and often genetically modified) seed stocks, home gardens represent a vast storehouse of genetic diversity because the system has acted to naturally conserve a broad spectrum of seed types, many of which may otherwise have dwindled to extinction.

In addition to the improved food and economic security offered by home gardens, they play an important ecological role. Roughly mimicking a natural forest, the collection of floral species provides habitat and resources for a variety of other plants and animals which together constitute a diverse community. Over time this will enrich the soil through composting and aeration, allowing for increased productivity. When home gardens form a mosaic across the landscape, like contiguous forests, they become very influential to micro-climatic processes, having a regulatory effect on rainfall patterns, absorbing pollution and cooling the environment. In undulating terrain, the root systems provide an effective barrier to erosion and landslides.

Socially, this is a system conceived and implemented mostly by women and has thus influenced community dynamics through the shaping of gender roles. It is already seen as an integral part of the structure of many areas of rural Sri Lanka and an emphasis on the strengths of this local innovation in new areas may supply favourable returns from the perspective of food, economic and ecological security.

A dry zone habitat drastically enriched by the recent establishment of a home garden.

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