In the era of high-rise apartments and small kitchen gardens, Kenyans have adopted innovative gardening ideas to grow food for subsistence consumption.
Others, however, use the gardens for cash crop farming to supplement their monthly incomes.
Kenyans.co.ke sought to explain 5 of the most common innovative gardening ideas.
Square Foot Garden
This involves growing plants in square grids. The partitions are important as they allow crop rotation at three or six months intervals.
“In this food growing method, after a plant is harvested, a new one is sown or planted in its place to keep beds at full occupancy, further reducing the ability of weeds to set up camp.
“Compared with traditional row growing, not only is extensive time and energy spent on weed control minimized, tilling and fertilizing are also eliminated, as is the use of pesticides or herbicides,” explain gardening experts at Gardeners Path.
Expandable Step Garden
These gardens take the shape of a staircase, taking up little space.
They are conducive to small gardens common in gated communities in Kenya.
Garden vegetables such as kale and herbs such as rosemary do well in such gardens.
Vertical garden
Vertical gardening involves recycling plastic bottles where the seeds are planted, and the bottles hang on a wall.
Because the plants are away from the ground, they become less susceptible to diseases. They are also easy to work on as the gardener operates while standing rather than bending.
“Note that vertical gardens might need more frequent watering.
“Wall-mounted planters especially are likely to require regular watering because of the rain shadow cast by the wall,” detail gardening website Almanac.
Tyre Garden
Tyre gardens are a great way of sprucing up backyards. They are innovative, requiring upcycling old tyres instead of throwing them away.
They are also stylish and creative and can produce much food in little space. The tyres can be painted with different colours to brighten up the garden.
“The process starts by placing a cardboard sheet under the tyre, adding chitted potatoes and covering it with mud.
“As the plant grows in height, stack one more tyre and follow the same process until these tyres are filled with sprouting buds. Harvesting is easy too. Knock off the tyres and roll out the potatoes,” explain farming experts Ugaoo.
Gutter Garden
This method incorporates pipes punctured in holes in equal intervals on one side of the pipe.
The pipes are then filled with soil, and seeds are planted in the holes. This method is convenient for urban settings because they use little space.
Pipes can be stacked vertically using wooden stilts on the edges to hold them up, thus increasing the yield grown.
