Urban Oasis, a six-part video series, looks at community food gardening projects that employ, up-skill, and feed local residents. The series explores themes of sustainability, self-reliance, food security, community-building, and environmental impact.
- A community food garden in Hout Bay supplies fresh vegetables to 26 early childhood development centres.
- The Love in a Bowl project started in 2015 with just a single vegetable circle and has grown to include a farmer’s market and community composting initiative.
- During the pandemic-induced lockdown, the organisation partnered with community leaders to distribute weekly food parcels of organic vegetables in Imizamo Yethu.
Produce from a local food garden that started as a single vegetable circle eight years ago now feeds hundreds of vulnerable children in Imizamo Yethu and Hangberg in Hout Bay.
South Africa’s Early Childhood Development (ECD) policy recognises healthy eating in infancy and childhood as vital for optimal health, growth, and development.
Despite this, a 2022 study found that 65% of the country’s four to five-year-olds fail to meet their age’s expected early learning and physical growth standards. A quarter of children surveyed showed signs of long-term malnutrition, which presents itself as stunted physical growth.
Hunger among children only worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic as ECD centres closed and household incomes plummeted.
During this time, a non-profit organisation in Hout Bay – Love in a Bowl – began distributing weekly food parcels of organic vegetables. This produce, grown at the Love in a Bowl farm, found its way to the most vulnerable households in Imizamo Yethu through a network of community leaders and a WhatsApp group.
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The feeding programme then further developed into a community clean-up initiative.
This type of evolution has come to typify the Love in a Bowl project, which began in 2015 as one lone vegetable circle tended to by a single gardener. The humble garden supplied vegetable soup to one community programme each week.
The Love in a Bowl food garden in Hout Bay.
Today, the farm includes 50 vegetable circles, supported by nearly 40 staff and interns, which supplies fresh produce to 26 early childhood development centres in Imizamo Yethu and Hangberg.
Love in a Bowl has also formed valuable donation and supply partnerships with the local Spar franchise, hotels, and restaurants. A market at the farm, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, offers organically grown seasonal vegetables, juices, free-range eggs, homemade bread, honey, and sauces.
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A community composting initiative, the latest addition to the Love in a Bowl project, adds to the goal of sustainability by collecting kitchen waste to enrich the soil used to grow vegetables.
Ziyanda Phandle, Love in a Bowl’s farm manager said:
Because we’re a non-profit organisation, the composting project that we recently started is going to help us a lot because currently, we’re carrying a huge cost of compost.
“Once that is up and running, at least we’ll be able to use those funds that we currently use for compost for something else that can benefit the community.”
Ladles of Love supplement the vegetables supplied to the ECD centres with donated dry goods, and Phandle hopes to include warm meals in future.
“It’s very important for the kids to grow up, knowing they must eat vegetables, and that’s where this project comes in because the communities we are delivering to are really disadvantaged… if the kids are hungry, they won’t be able to learn,” says Phandle.