Community members learn horticultural skills

 Taking care of the environment is one of the crucial aspects of life. As such, the Department of Horticultural Sciences recently hosted a workshop at the department’s nursery at the Bellville Campus aimed at teaching community members about sustainable gardening, improving their gardening skills, and beautifying their area.

The two programmes, Horticulture and Landscape Architecture from the Department of Horticultural Sciences, have done a vegetable garden and landscape design for the Good Hope College (Kuils River) in 2022. Yonela Matanzima, Lecturer: Horticultural Sciences, said: “We realised that we cannot always do things for people as we will not always be there. That is how the idea of the workshop came about. We saw that there were skills and knowledge that we could share with the community.”

Matanzima stated that the workshop's purpose was to improve the community members' horticultural skills and landscape maintenance and to learn more about organic feeding, the benefits of feeding crops organically, and pest control using organic methods. The learners from Good Hope College were brought in to learn how to grow their own food and to take care of the plants.

The topics discussed during this fruitful session were organic feeding and pest control, turf grass maintenance, and the importance of pruning and pruning techniques. Landscape Architecture third-year student Siphumelele Chuma delivered a presentation on turf grass maintenance. Matanzima lauded Siphumelele, who was very confident and knew a lot about the subject. “This shows that the lecturers are doing a great job.” He was able to answer questions from the audience without the assistance of a lecturer. The guest lecturer, Alex Duff from Spectrum Marketing, shared his industry knowledge with the students and the community.

“I am proud of a job well done as this shows that we can be agents to our local communities. As a Workplace-Based Learning programme Coordinator and [being] partially involved in Service-Learning/Community Engagement, I see the change we make around our communities. The students were very happy as they were exposed to different approaches of learning. They were given a chance to apply what they were taught in class and share it with the community.”

After the workshop, the community had an opportunity to tour the departments’ facilities.

This was a follow-up workshop following the departments' initiative in the community vegetable gardens with Dr Mandilakhe Naku, Service-Learning Coordinator, and the second-year Horticulture class and workplace-based learning third-year Landscape Architecture students. “We saw that there’s a need for sharing knowledge so that they can look after the plants that we were planting there,” Matanzima noted.

The members of the community who are also employees of Good Hope College enjoyed every moment as they were learning more about their plants and how to look after them. This Christian school focuses more on instilling Christian values in learners. “Taking care of the environment is one of their important elements. This gave them a chance to learn more. Being able to ask and hear directly on how to resolve some issues was quite beneficial,” Matanzima observed.

"Thank you for your thoughtfulness in including us in your field of expertise," said one of the community members, John Eager, who is also a teacher.

Matanzima added: In the future, I think instead of going out to communities and doing the projects for them, we better bring them in and teach them how it is done. When we leave after we finish the projects, we leave them without knowledge of how to maintain the plants.”

Written by Aphiwe Boyce
Email: boyceap@cput.ac.za