What does home gardening mean?

Home gardening means the cultivation of flowers, fruits, vegetables, or ornamental plants for the personal use of the owner or tenants of a lot. Home gardens consist of a variety of components and species that represent social and traditional aspects of different societies.

Home gardening

activities are vital and fit well with your daily household activities and employment patterns, along with your cultural and aesthetic values. Having family gardens and caring for your own plants can serve as a respite from the daily stresses of life.

There is a vast bibliography that presents research and case studies focusing on the role of family gardens as agroforestry or food production systems, or a combination of both. Home gardening often involves horticulture: growing fruits, vegetables and herbs for personal consumption, as well as creating aesthetics and diversity for the lives of birds and insects with attractive flower beds. Family gardens may be delimited by physical demarcations, such as hedges or hedges, fences, ditches, or boundaries established through mutual understanding. The two main national home gardening programs in Sri Lanka are “Api Wavamu”, “Rata Nagamu” (Let's Cultivate to Uplift the Nation) and “Divinaguma” (“Improvement of Livelihoods”).

In fact, almost half of the food consumed at home and a third of the food sold in the market comes from these lots of orchards. This trend continues and family gardens continue to significantly complement food security and household livelihood. The areas of nutrition, access to new technologies, extension and counseling services, economic and non-economic benefits, women's empowerment, and the long-term sustainability of family gardens, specifically in post-conflict situations, require more research. Consequently, much attention is paid to family gardens as a strategy to improve household food security and nutrition.

The most fundamental social benefit of family gardens comes from their direct contribution to household food security by increasing the availability, accessibility and use of food products. Currently, two national initiatives are under way that receive significant government sponsorship to initiate a nationwide food production campaign to establish one million home gardens across the island. The in-depth exploration of past and more recent compositions on family gardens around the world not only confirms Landon-Lane's vision, but also recognizes additional advantages. The intimate association of trees, crops and animals in family gardens makes them a good example of an agroforestry system.