Reaping from high value vegetables

By OTUSHABIRE TIBYANGYE

Ruth Nashaba has grown vegetables for 15 years. This has been on a small scale, using basic methods and poor seeds until the intervention of the district agricultural department.

In 1992, Nashaba and her village mates formed a group, Kyabaiba Abamwe Women Group in Nyabikungu Parish Rwampara, to escape poverty by pooling resources together and using proceeds from their small gardens of vegetables. However the income was not sufficient because of poor farming methods. “We were using poor seedlings and poor farming methods of draining the wetland without adding manure to the soils.

Whenever it rained, we would lose some of our crops because of cultivating in the middle of the wetland until the intervention of extension workers,” she recalls. They were taught how to use the wetland sustainably by using the periphery of the wetland. They were also taught the use of the existing rivulets to irrigate their crops using watering cans and taking water to their gardens without draining the water away.

Nashaba and her group proved good students and have started reaping big from their plots of land using high value seeds provided by the project. “We have been given high yield seeds of carrots, egg plants, tomatoes, green pepper, cauliflower and radish among others which have done very well in the first harvest,” she says.

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