A paradise in the urban jungle, Siyakhana Food Garden Project, co-sponsored by the Woolworths Trust, provides food for city children and hope for a sustainable future.

Hlangi Vundla is more than a brilliant a gardener. 

He has a degree in agriculture and his title is Stakeholder Engagement Manager for the Siyakhana Food Garden Project in Bezuidenhout Park, Johannesburg.

Hlangi’s interest in nature, planting and harvesting, and sharing what he knows, is far from academic. It’s handson and visceral. And it’s poetic.

“I am a lover of nature. Growing things, understanding the reason things happen in nature, why the wind blows in August in Johannesburg, why the rains come in summer, how all is explained by nature and the seasons, is enthralling for me.”

Siyakhana Food Garden Project, which recently received a financial injection to the tune of R1 million thanks to the Woolworths Trust and Absa, is a lush haven in Bezuidenhout Park where celery lives happily with mint, where bright red tomatoes commune with nuts and spinach sprouts next to lettuce.

It’s also an urban agricultural project established by the University of the Witwatersrand's Public Oral Health and Health Promotion Unit.

It’s a place of companion planting and intercropping, where only organic sprays are ever used, and it supplies eight inner city crèches – at least 360 hungry kids – with fruit and vegetables.

Mushrooms have now been introduced after Hlangi’s research showed that the children have very little protein in their diets, “and mushrooms are a better source of protein than meat.

It takes 16 hours for mushrooms to be converted to protein, compared to chicken’s 28 hours,” he says.

It’s also a place that tries to counteract the effects of rising food prices and where locals in the area can buy fresh fruit straight from the ground.

Growing, planting and nurturing is watched over by Garden Manager Mandla Tshabalala, who, having learnt about natural medicine from his grandfather, is passionate about permaculture – “gardens that are sustainable and self-sufficient”, giving people some form of food security in an alienating global food system.

He is also a proponent of organic gardening, to “promote life in the soil”. And he is dedicated to educating others: “Giving spades and seeds to people is not enough,” he says.

As a result of Woolworths’ and Absa's support, NGO members and schools in the area were offered courses to teach them how to start their own gardens to grow food, make good use of their resources and uncared-for spaces, and which herbs and foods are medicinal and nutritious.

“Entrepreneurship is one course. Seed preservation is another. People were taught how to plant in tyres or boxes, how to collect water and benefit from site selection," says Mandla.

“Food security,” he says, “is about the ability of households to feed themselves, to learn how to preserve and prepare foods so that their health-giving qualities are retained.”

This ties in perfectly with Woolworths' Good Business Journey, which focuses on increasing availability and access to nutritious food, as well as, says Zinzi Mgolodela, BEE Transformation Manager, “Improving skills and extending a community’s knowledge base of local and sustainable food”.

"Increasing the availability and accessibility of good food is at the core of Woolworths’ business and its corporate social investment,” says Mgolodela.

She commends the way “Siyakhana has transformed a sterile, underutilised area of city parkland into a thriving, food-rich environment that fosters community resilience and empowerment”.

Hlangi says research shows that, on average, one person who attends their workshops “will share the knowledge with nine people”.

Siyakhana is now negotiating with the council to take over an abandoned restaurant in the park to run as a “training and business centre where people can enjoy organic, healthy eating”.

His dream, he says, is to “see more parks creating food forests, with more spaces being used in this way.”