Scaling Up Nutrition | Civil Society Alliance Myanmar

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Color Demo Gardening To Increase Diet Diversity And Availability of Healthy Food For Families

Daw Myint Myint Aye is a passionate gardener and rice farmer. She lives in Sar Ma Lauk village of the Thazin Kone village track in Bogale Township. As a widow and mother of two children she has to work hard to support her family. . She has lots of experience in gardening and cooperates in projects implemented by Welthungerhilfe already since 2010. At this time she started to plant vegetables with the focus to diversify the diet of her family, applying traditional planting methods, for example ground planting and trellis planting. Today she is one of our leading persons in color demo gardening for home consumption. This is a successful tool to increase the diversity in the daily nutrition of families. The gardener integrates vegetables with different colors into their garden: red, yellow or orange, white or brown, green and purple. Each color represents a different nutrient content and different benefit to the people. Red vegetables for instance have heaps of vitamin A, green ones lots of iron, yellow and orange ones vitamin C. This method makes it easier to explain to the individuals that each vegetable has different benefits for human beings and therefore we have to diversify our diet.  Color demo gardening also has the advantage that the families do not have to buy vegetables in the market, their products are not treated with chemicals and they can sell the surplus to their neighbors. Many of our demo farmers say, that those vegetables have a better taste.

Daw Myint Myint Aye planted vegetables in monsoon and winter season. She received ten different types of seeds from the project, addionally materials to construct her table garden, some compost, training and advice from our staff. This time she applied again different cropping methods like table gardening, rain guard, bag gardening and the traditional methods she already knew. Besides the vegetables from home consumption, she has about 2000 kyats each day of extra income by selling her products in the neighborhood.

“I definitely will continue with my garden after the project has finished, I am very thankful for the support and knowledge I received, I also keep seeds from local varieties and will share my knowledge with the people in my village”, says Daw Myint.

Eating a diverse vigorous diet has a positive effect to health and makes people more resistant to diseases. In September 2018 a group of 29 villagers from other areas came to visit her and were impressed by the achievement.

Conributed by LANN+ project, Welthungerhilfe