Gardens for Healthy Taste

Would you like to eat a food that has 7 times the Vitamin C of oranges and 5 times the Calcium of milk and twice the protein of yogurt? Is this a trick question? We have a friend here that says it “tastes healthy.” For us, it’s a no brainer. We eat leaves of the Moringa tree all the time and use them as a leafy green in many dishes. We’ve been growing these small trees in our backyard since very soon after we came here. The locals like to eat them most in a dish that is just the leaves stuck together with a sauce from peanut butter and onions. It still surprises us how little it is eaten or grown by individual families though. Our most recent CHE training in our own region was on family nutrition and it featured Moringa as a main tool for increasing nutrition. 

A woman at the place of pounding millet
to get out the usable grains.

Talking about Moringa was coupled with a good discussion on three large groups of food needed for nutrition: carbs, proteins, and vitamin giving fruits/vegetables. The evangelists seem to get the benefits of having all three, but practically people will have very little variety in their diets, eating millet all the time or rice if they can afford it, with whatever kind of flavorings for sauce they can afford, which is sometimes nothing. 

To get more variety, vitamins, and keep costs low, CHE encourages people to think about planting their own small garden plot somewhere in the space where they’re living. But we’ve found this is so problematic because of pests, animals, children, lack of water and lack of space (space in the village is already full of the aforementioned problems; space outside is too far from water sources). When one of the evangelists went back home and planted like we suggested, he quickly realized that lizards were eating the sprouts as soon as they came up. We found the same at our home so we have to put a mosquito net over anything we want to grow or it never gets a chance to come up properly. 

For water and space issues, we train about how to do a “kitchen garden,” on which you can pour your dish water or any other excess liquids. It’s also close by where you cook so you can get fresh things to add into meals! Further, “garden bags” are a good solution for space as they get plants to grow in vertical space out of the sides of gunny sacks filled with dirt and manure and gravel. The gravel helps the water you dump on top to flow down to each level of plantings, so you have a maximum utilization of the water that is too much for the first plant but is used on the next layer down and so on. “Use what you have!” It can sound pretty simple, but it really comes slowly to get used to living so intentionally with everything you have to use.

--El Padre