Gone are the days when people especially those in urban centres used to give the issue of having small land as the reason as to why they fail to practice farming to improve their living standards especially financially.
Growing your own food is a great way to save money and eat more healthily so it’s important to make the most of the space you have available.
Here are a few tips that will help you grow your best vegetable and earn more money to supplement on your earnings;
Setting up
Replace your flowers backyard garden with vegetables. Make a nursery bed; when the seedlings are ready, pot them. The most recommended backyard vegetables include spinach, cabbage, tomatoes, spring onions, sukuma wiki, eggplants, among others.
Look for discarded or broken milk crates from the nearby factories and put in soil, mix it with organic manure (droppings of goats, Pigs, cows etc).
When the mixture is ready, transplant the vegetables from a nursery bed to the crates and other containers, which have been transformed to hold the plants.
Going commercial
Your initial intention may not be to grow vegetables for sale but rather for home consumption.
If you cannot consume all vegetables from your garden, start selling them to your friends who visit your home.
You can expand the space you use for growing vegetables to the veranda of the house to be able to maximise profits. The advantage of growing vegetables in pots is that they are easier to manage and free of weeds.
If a particular plant is diseased, it is easy to remove, destroy it and reuse the pot.
It eases the work and the vegetables can be arranged in an orderly manner to make the compound look neat.
Harvesting
Once it gets ready, harvests can be done once every two weeks for the bigger clients such as hotels and schools, which buy in bulk. This can earn you Shs300,000 every after two weeks.
You can also sell to individual customers at about Shs5,000 per kilogramme and Shs1,000 a bundle, and in total you may earn Shs1m a month or more from your garden.
You can also turn your garden into a kind of demonstration for schools and individuals, at a small fee for study visits.
People living in urban areas should stop lamenting that they do not have land for farming. Ladies should take it as an example to give their husbands a break from demanding money for vegetables and use their backyards. It will give them economic emancipation.
-Office of Agric Minister
