HORTICULTURAL FARMING AT MAZIMBU

HORTICULTURAL FARMING

Horticulture is the science or art of cultivating fruits, vegetables, flowers, or ornamental plants. The term horticultural can be broken down into two Latin words: hortus (garden) and cultus (tilling).It involves the cultivation of a garden, orchard, nursery, flowers, fruits, vegetables, or ornamental plants. Leaf or green vegetables are growing in flats soil. Most are picked young, so successive plantings are often used to extend the season. (E.g. lettuce, spinach). Leaf vegetables are typically low in calories and fat, and high in protein per calorie, vitamin c also the vitamin K content of leaf vegetables is particularly high.
 for more information click here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horticulture

Our university endowed to have large land size that can use enough for university activities and other part can be leased to other people for commercial cultivation of green vegetables. Most of farmers are women that engaged in agribusiness as a self employment they produce okra, cassava leaves, spinach, sweet potato leaves(matembere), tomatoes and so forth.

The following are important factors that influence horticultural production in this area; 

 

Availability of enough land, since SUA is well endowed with large size of the land that why the excess land are used by farmers for horticultural cultivation.

Presence of Ngerengere River stream for irrigation activities, it is very important factor since horticultural crops have greater water requirements than cereals farming. Many horticultural crops require irrigation on a regular schedule and potentially more often, so this river stream enable the farmers to produce even if there is no rainfall and can sell at good price because during dry season supply of vegetables are very low.

Availability of reliable market, since customers are near to the production area thus facilitates easily supply of horticultural products. Also transport system supports producer to link with customers found far away from production area.

The most challenges of horticultural farming in this area are pests and diseases. Also there is great amount of uncertainty about climatic condition because there possibilities of water floods from Ngerengere River stream during rainy season as well as drought during dry season.

  For more information listen this audio;

                  

Prepared by:

No	Name of participant	Registration numbers
01	SELYA, Noel Yared	AEA/D/2013/0024
02	MGAYA, Advela B	AEA/D/2013/0136
03	LUVINGA, Judson E	AEA/D/2013/0067
04	MWANANGWA, Fredric G	AEA/D/2013/0164

 For further study read the following PDF document
Horti Final Report.pdf by Noel Selya