Nambole High School- SPG 2022 project story

School Gardening Project SPG 2022 Update! Today’s success story is from Nambole High School located in Kira Town Council, Wakiso District. Nambole High School is a mixed day and boarding, private & Christian founded secondary school that started in 2000 and offers both Arts and Science subjects at both "O" & "A'' levels. At Nambole High, 85 students from several classes participated in this urban farming vegetable school project where they planted tomato, eggplant, carrot, and cabbage. According to Ms. Mbekeka, the Agricultural teacher in-charge of the project, students participated in various horticultural activities including nursery bed management, transplanting, managing of vegetables in the field, harvesting, and carrying out post-harvest practices like sorting & grading. Ms. Mbekeka adds that students and the school are grateful for project, many of our students come from urban and peri-urban areas and have never grown any crops before. Participating in this project gave them an opportunity to plant their own crops and manage them, and a number of them have learned skills that they will use in their academic and agribusiness life. Our students enjoyed participating in this project and this is one of the reasons for our project success, we had good yields, our environment is well cared for, and more students enrolled in agricultural education classes. To date, much of our vegetable produce has since been harvested and used at the school cafeteria to feed students and staff, Ms. Mbekeka added. Our main challenges were having some of our crops accidentally sprayed with weed killer as students were spraying weeds around the school fence, some of our crops were destroyed by free-range poultry belonging to staff members and lastly the drought affected us at the fruiting time. Regardless, we had a good pilot project, and we hope to do better in the next phase. Ms. Mbekeka concluded by appreciating Victoria seeds for supporting the project and YoFFA for coordinating its implementation. This two-teacher agriculture education program is led by Ms. Mbekeka Viola and assisted by 3 other teachers of the Economics and Luganda departments. At YoFFA, we thank Nambole High School for the support extended to this project in terms of providing gardening supplies, allocation of land for the project, and allocation of gardening time on the school timetable. The School Gardening Program SPG 2022 is supported by Victoria Seeds (U) Limited, Holistic eLearning Platform and the 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐡 𝐅𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐅𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚 (𝐘𝐨𝐅𝐅𝐀) organization. Good job, Nambole High School!!!