*** 10 Square Meter/100 Square Foot Nutrition Gardens (10/100NG) ***
ZeroHunger’s first challenge is exactly that—enough calories to survive. A second important challenge is good nutrition. Often it seems that all the labor or financial resources go to the staple crops such as grains and legumes that provide the calories with little left to provide the foods that round out the nutrition and promote health.
10 Square Meter/100 Square Foot intensively and diversely planted Nutrition Gardens I10/100NG) for each person are a solution to providing the nutrition to add to the staple crop calories. This size garden can provide 195 kg/400 pounds of produce in a six month growing season. If season extension such as row cover is available or year round gardening is possible, an additional 45+kg/100 pounds of food may be grown in most months. These gardens reduce water usage and weeding with their intense planting. Gardening and harvesting can be accomplished in an average of two hours a week.
Cities and towns are encouraged to make at least this much food gardening space available to each person as part of the land around their housing or in nearby allotments and community gardens. People on farms can put the 10/100NGs in a kitchen garden near the house. This allows the stay at home gardener to garden it between other chores and makes it easy for students to tend it before or after school.
Gardeners are encouraged to grow a mixed selection of produce that provides nutrition and flavoring including greens, alliums, herbs, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, summer squash, Fresh peas, green beans, and fresh non-staple root vegetables such as radishes/beets/carrots. Productivity improves with succession planting and trellising. The gardening can be accomplished with as few tools as a flat bladed D-handle shovel and a bucket. A homi (triangular headed hand hoe), stakes for trellising, string, and watering can/hose add to productivity and make the job easier.
A 10/100NG positively impacts the gardeners food in as little as three weeks when the earliest radishes and their greens are ready to eat. Photo shows a day’s harvest from a 10/100NG test garden in a temperate climate garden at the height of the summer. Other vegetables and herbs were available on other days and in other months.
Garden organizers are encouraged to develop sample gardens along with the gardeners that will be implementing them that suit the area's preferred foods, and to provide a matching planting and harvesting plan to help increase a fast start and success. Observing how local expert gardeners implement the process can lead to additional sample designs. If space and gardeners are available at demonstration garden sites, a third type of sample garden that introduces people to new vegetables that are especially nutritious can be useful if combined with a cooking demonstration and tasting opportunity.
***Resources***
How to Grow More Vegetables, Ninth Edition: (and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land with Less Water Than You Can Imagine by John Jeavons
One Circle: How to Grow a Complete Diet in Less Than 1,000 Square Feet by David Duhon
***Calculations and conversions***
100 square feet = 9.29 square meters
400 pounds = 181.5 kg
10 square meters = 107.64 square feet
1.0764 * 400 pounds = 430.56 pounds =195.3 kg
Test gardens had 4 foot wide beds (1.2 meter), for example 4 feet by 25 feet (1.2x 7.62 meter) of garden bed space.
Sharon Gordon