Nutrition through food forests & gardens in Kenya

INTRODUCTION

Greetings to us all from DNRC family and our 886 smallholder farmers and 12 schools we work with. We are always happy to share with you our quarterly reports which enable DNRC in achieving her goal of environmental, economical and social regeneration of the communities we work with in the drylands of Kenya. Nutrition through food forests and Kitchen gardens continue to be key project in achieving these goals. Your continued support on the same enable us to serve our farmers and schools to move towards long term sustainability as they balance development by equally addressing environmental social and economic pillars. Thank you so much for your kind support. As climate change effects continue to bite especially in the drylands, the food forests a kitchen gardens continue to cushion our farmers by providing adequate and nutritional food for domestic use and sell extra for income. The DNRC food forest and kitchen gardens continue also to provide food for the staff, visitors, interns and the surrounding farmers and schools. During this reporting period, the main activities involved maintaining the food forest and planting groundcover especially cowpeas during the rainy season. DNRC food forest has created nice microclimate to support diverse exotic plants, we have introduced coffee and they seem to be doing great. in terms of organic kitchen gardens, we have been renewing our kitchen gardens beds and maintaining them by watering, adding manure, mulching and frequent pest and disease control through integrated Pest Management (IPM). Below are detailed activities done during this reporting quarter.

DNRC FOOD FOREST

During this reporting quarter, DNRC staff in charge of the food forest majorly focused on maintaining the food forest through chop and drop so as to open up for the production trees to get enough sunlight. They were also involved in manuring and mulching the production trees. We managed to harvest the following products during the quarter from the food forest: 20kg of vegetables, 20 pieces of pawpaw and 50 cups of mulberry fruits.

 DNRC KITCHEN GARDEN

During the reporting quarter, the kitchen garden staff were busy renewing the gardens and planting diverse vegetables with emphasis on indigenous vegetables such as cowpeas, black night shade, amaranth among others. They also expanded spinach and kales beds as well as routinely controlled pests and diseases through Integrated Pest Management. During the quarter they also harvesting over 100kg of vegetables for staff and extra sold for income.

CHALLENGES

Water remain our biggest challenge as we don’t have permanent water source and rely of seasonal river hence limiting our expansion possibilities

FOCUS FOR THE NEXT QUARTER

• Continue maintaining DNRC kitchen gardens as well as farmers
• Continue maintaining DNRC food forests and those of the farmers