Munsieville’s veggie garden to be proud of
Checkers and Food & Trees South Africa recently visited the Thoughtful Path communty centre to see their veggie garden and help them out some more.
In December, the team from Checkers and Shoprite visited the Thoughtful Path Project’s veggie garden to spoil some of the community members and speak to them about the garden.
Checkers partnered with Food & Trees for South Africa in March this year to provide training to the Munsieville community who work in the gardens and also help with seedlings and the infrastructure for the centre’s garden.
Betty Nkoana, director of the centre explained that there are many single mothers in the Munsieville community who are unemployed. This in turn leads to a lack of food in some households.
Tim Abaa from Food & Trees have been helping the community to expand their garden and teaching them how to grow their own food. A generous farmer donated a piece of land to the project in 2012 and currently they are successfully growing herbs, spinach, cabbage, corn and pumpkins.
Safura Sheriff, Public Relations Manager for Checkers said they were not only involved with this project but that Checkers reached their 100th community garden recently. This means they are assisting 100 community gardens throughout South Africa.
Each of the gardeners at Thoughtful Path were sponsored with a hat and apron from Checkers and Safura also announced the sponsorship of a 10 000 litre water tank that will help the community collect rain water to use in their garden.
Checkers also announced that farmers who have a surplus of fruit and vegetables will be able to sell their extras in the stores on market day.
Apart from assisting with the gardens, Checkers also donates their surplus food from their store to the local communities every day. They have 19 mobile soup kitchens that serve meals to 1 000 people in communities around South Africa from Mondays to Fridays.
Tim explained to the crowd how they could make a living by planting fruit and vegetables, and said that there should never be an end to educating oneself. He told them that Checkers chose to assist them and that they should make the most of that opportunity.
Before everyone departed to admire the project’s garden, Betty told those in attendance that by providing more fruit and vegetables to the communities they could reduce the numbers at the clinic, because people will be healthier.
