Adopt A Plot

BY SARAH EL SAFTY

The American University in Cairo is now giving students, faculty and staff a chance to get hands-on experience in cultivating and growing their own vegetables.

The Adopt-a-Plot program, drawn up by the Research Institute for a Sustainable Environment (RISE) in the 2013 Spring semester, provides each member a plot of land for an entire semester where they can harvest their own vegetables and crops.

“The point of all this is to have an awareness about agriculture because most of the people live in the cities and have no communication about planting and cultivating,” said RISE researcher Mohamed Wahba.

“So, we’re trying to get this closer to their minds,” he added. The program consists of seminars and workshops by a master gardener who instructs members how to plant and care for the crops as well as teach them how to deal with crop diseases.

Wahba said that the idea first originated when several members of the AUC community who wanted to be educated about planting approached RISE.

“We thought we can give them theoretical lectures but after all you can find them on YouTube. So, in parallel to that we give them a piece of land to plant and they also get the practical learning,” he said.

Maha Bali, Associate Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching, said that living in England, where a lot of people did gardening, made her want to learn to harvest herself. This program gave her the perfect opportunity to do just that.

However, this program can also be seen as a social experience rather than just an educational one. Wahba said that a good mix of faculty, staff and students come together to share plots and ideas.

Bali reiterated this notion by saying that through this program she reconnected with her colleagues. “I had a new person coming to work at my department who would be reporting to me and I thought it might be a good chance to build our relationship at something other than work,” she said.

However, members said that they wished they were more involved in the process of harvesting. Noura Shalaby, an Economics Junior, said that she wished she didn’t get help with her planting. “I think it would have been more fulfilling if we were 100 percent responsible,” she said.

Bali also added, “the real work is done by the RISE people. “It’s a plus, but when we find diseases on our plants and we tell them, it sometimes take a while until they find an organic solution to the problem and we don’t have control over what happens.”

Wahba explained that the problem lies in the fact that it is hard to find organic pesticides in Egypt.

He said that the chemical pesticides available in the market were not recommended so they had to go to great lengths to find organic ones.

However, the members have found it increasingly satisfying to harvest their own food and then bring them home and distribute them to family members. Bali said: “I got to distribute to people around me like my mom and mother-in-law and cousins and my driver and maid. I was really proud.”

Registration for this program started on February 16. Each plot costs 300 EGP with every plot requiring at least two participants.