Doing their bit for National Arbour Week, Pam Golding Properties in Grahamstown planted a wild olive tree in the Umthathi Training Project’s Linomtha community garden.
Doing their bit for National Arbour Week, Pam Golding Properties in Grahamstown planted a wild olive tree in the Umthathi Training Project’s Linomtha community garden.
Recognising the importance of Umthathi’s many years and efforts to improve the lives of local communities, the tree is an addition to one of the project’s many gardens.
Custodian of Umthathi, Lawrence Sisitka explained that the community garden is on land leased from Makana as part of the municipality’s drive to improve conditions for local communities, and has been many years in the making.
Sisitka said the project has features including an area devoted to demonstration gardens in which vegetables are cultivated by the Umthathi staff, “and a larger area dedicated as an indigenous plant centre where local indigenous plants are propagated, grown and sold”.
The largest area is devoted to the cultivation of vegetables for self-sufficiency and sale by local community groups and individuals, he explained. “These community gardeners are trained and supported in sustainable vegetable production by the Umthathi trainers,” Sisitka added.
Umthathi’s community garden co-ordinator Sicelo Dyira invites applications from community groups for plots to grow vegetables at Linomtha. Dyira is hopeful that within the next six months the entire area will be under cultivation.
The produce from these gardens will help to improve the food security of local communities, Dyira said, and in the process enables the gardeners to generate some income.
Sisitka said they intend to hold regular markets where Umthathi and the community gardeners will have the opportunity to sell their produce to local consumers.
Another upcoming event that township gardeners can look forward to is this year’s flower festival in early October. Entries for the Township Gardens section of the festival’s Gardens of Grahamstown competition are open until Friday 21 September.
Entry forms for this category are available from Umthathi Training Project at 23 Xhora Street in Extension 7. For questions about this and the Linomtha gardening project contact Dyira at 046 637 0012.
