Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Home Gardening is the practice of growing and cultivating plants for the purpose of food production by the people on their own (Webb and Kabir, 2009). In these gardens, plants such as root vegetables, leaf vegetables, fruits, and herbs are grown. In some gardens, ornamental plants are grown for their flower, foliage, or for aesthetic appearance and in some gardens medicinal plants, herbs, and spices are grown. Zasada et al, 2020 define home gardening as mixed cropping of vegetables, fruits, crops, spices, herbs, and ornamental plants, etc. Actually, home gardening is an ancient and widespread practice where the food production has been yielded from small plots nearby the living space (Laleci and Ozden, 2017). Nowadays, it has been reframed and integrated into kitchen, backyard, farmyard, compound, and homestead, etc.
For centuries, home gardening has been widespread in rural areas due to enormous free space nearby (Ghosh, 2014). Mostly, rural gardens have leaf and root vegetables to steadily endure their food and financial security to the family. Recently, such practice also engendered into urban areas mainly due to awareness of toxic-free food supply, pollution control, physical fitness, and physiological factors, etc among the people. However, urban gardeners have certain issues and challenges in the procedure and process of home gardening practice. So, the aim of this study is to investigate the home gardens from the point of view of urban gardeners of Madurai city in terms of their importance, benefits, and limitations.
Madurai is a major and third largest city of Tamil Nadu an Indian state. It is located at 9.93°N 78.12°E and holds a population of 1,470,755 people with a sex ratio of 999 females out for 1000 males (Rajan, 2015). Madurai city has a remarkable change in the increase in population growth due to urbanization, an increase in industrial activities, infrastructure facilities, and transportation. This increases the number of educational institutions, multistory buildings, business complexes, conversion of independent houses to flats and apartments, etc. Further, this leads to the enormous growth of vehicles ranges from two wheels to four wheels for transportation. These all have resulted in a pollution index of 69.03% (WHO) and Pollution Exp Scale of 119.88. Moreover, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has reported that there is an increase in the trend of the atmospheric temperature in Madurai city by analyzing the data over a period of 62 years.
More number of research works have contributed their ideas in encouraging the urban people towards home gardening practices for the betterment of food and financial security (Schupp and Sharp, 2012; Zasada et al, 2020; Vijayaraghavan et al, 1997). This creates a greater impact among the urban peoples for their nutritional and quality food systems. In addition, the cost of daily needs such as vegetables and fruits increases a lot due to recent urbanization. This motivates the urban gardeners especially womens towards urban farming to overrule the cost incurred for daily needs. Unfortunately, the home gardeners are facing lot of challenges in practicing home gardens may be due to their expertise level in gardening, quality of water, rented house, pavement etc. Even though there are a number of mobile applications available, they are not compatible in local languages and not adaptable to Madurai city etc. Further, it requires lot of time to surf even for a specific issue such as pest management, water suitability etc.
So, this study investigates the home gardening practice in three aspects such as the importance of home gardening, economic and environmental benefits of home gardening and their limitations. There is no such study on analyzing these factors with the urban individuals that too like a city of Madurai and this is the first research study. As an outcome, this study also recommends the mobile and website developers about “what the urban home gardeners actually in need for home gardening practice?” from the mobile / web applications using appropriate statistical test. Further, this study mainly deals with the requirement analysis of what the urban home gardeners actually need from Home gardening Mobile/ Internet Guide applications.