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The garden at Oliver’s Village - named after Charles Dickens’ famous character Oliver Twist - has boosted this non-profit organisation’s capacity to spread hope in the Zenzele community in Daveyton.
Although one garden, it consists of three parts namely an educational section tended to by preschoolers, a productive garden run by a group of volunteers and a fruit forest, consisting of 200 trees. It produces tomatoes, peppers, cabbage and an array of other vegetables and fruit.
Oliver’s Village - a non-profit organisation - is situated on more than four hectares in Putfontein and the initiatives offered there include a soup kitchen, early childhood development centre, a learning centre where high school students get extra maths and physics lessons, a computer training centre and of course the food garden.
- Michelle da Costa, administrator of Oliver’s Village.
The educational garden was planted just under a year ago with the help of seedlings from Checkers’ Little Garden promotion. The community garden project had by then been abandoned after several failed attempts to get it going. The food forest had also been planted by then.
Checkers and its implementation partner, Food and Trees for Africa, assessed the garden and found it ideal for support in the form of permaculture training and the provision of seedlings and gardening tools.
- Michelle da Costa
A recent bumper harvest yielded 137 kg of butternut, 70 kg of tomatoes 40 kg of beetroot and 4 kg of green pepper.
The garden is part of the plan for Oliver’s Village to one day be financially self-sufficient.
- Michelle Da Costa
A unique feature of the village, which is in line with its aim to be self-sufficient, is that it operates totally off the grid. A photovoltaic power station generates its electricity. Ground- and rainwater is harvested for use in the garden. Biogas is produced from sewage, garden waste, manure and other organic materials. No municipal sewage services are used either, they use dry sanitation toilets, that don’t require plumbing, while waste from the ECD centre is channeled to the biogas digester.