Light Secondary & Vocational School, School Gardening SPG 2022 Project Story

𝐒𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐆𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐦 𝐒𝐏𝐆 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟐 𝐔𝐩𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞!!! Our 12th SPG 2022 story is about Light Secondary & Vocational School Bulenga in Bulenga town along Mityana Road, 7miles from the Kampala the capital city of Uganda. Light Secondary & Vocational School is a mixed day and boarding, private and Christian founded (Seventh Day Adventist) secondary school that started in 1993 and offers both Arts and sciences alongside Vocational, Polytechnic, primary and nursery education. At Light Secondary & Vocational School, 90 students in senior one (7th grade), senior two (8th grade), and senior three (9th grade) classes participated in the school gardening project. In this class-based gardening project, students were divided in 9 groups of 10 students, allocated a 10ft by 3ft plot of land and assigned a vegetable to plant. Senior one students planted cabbages, senior two students planted eggplants, and senior three students planted collards. Teachers of agricultural education at Light Sec & Voc engaged their students in various hands-on learning activities like land preparation, nursery bed management, transplanting, managing vegetables in the garden, harvesting, and carrying out post-harvest practices like sorting and grading, marketing, and selling the vegetables, said Ms. Nabasirye. In addition, students did some environmental conservation actions by recycling plastic bottles into irrigation bottles which they attached to sticks near their vegetables for water supply, Mr. Barigye added. When the cabbages and collards were affected by pests, students troubleshot the problem and opted for organic pesticides which they made from a mixture of garlic, pepper, ash, and fermented urine. This worked well for our crop. Today, we use this organic pesticide and organic fertilizer made from banana stems and sugar in the gardens to produce organic and healthy vegetables for our school, Mr. Asaba concluded. This project gave our urban & peri-urban students an opportunity to own gardens & practice gardening for the first time in their lives, students worked in groups and were able to share experiences. We believe that the school gardening project was a good fit for us. Students enjoyed participating in this project and this led to the success of our project, we have had a great yield. We have so far harvested lots of vegetables and sold them to the school and nearby community. We’re using the obtained money to buy seeds for our next session. Notwithstanding the good results, our project was attacked by pests during school holidays, free range poultry from our neighbors were another challenge, and thieves that harvested cabbages before maturity, Ms. Nabasirye added. This three-teacher program is lead by Ms. Kako Aminah Nabasirye and assisted by Mr. Barigye Innocent and Mr. Asaba Garrison. We thank them for great teamwork and their school administration for allocating land, providing gardening implements and pesticides that helped sustain the project. The School Gardening Program SPG 2022 is supported by Victoria Seeds (U) Limited Holistic eLearning Platform and the Youth Future Farmers of Africa (YoFFA) Uganda Good job, Light Secondary & Vocational School Bulenga!!!