Since moving to South Africa and to Hamburg in 2005, creative Parisian, Frank Danais, has turned a simple residential garden into an organic world of wonder. Frank and his assistant, local gardener Princess Khaka, spend every minute of the working day committed to discovering new and better ways of growing a large variety of nutritious vegetables, herbs, fruits and other plants. The garden uses zero pesticides, and nothing that is not freely available to the local Xhosa people in the area. The aim of this garden is to develop localised organic methods of growing what is needed to feed a family with their own nutritious fruit and vegetables, and to share this knowledge with the whole community.

Not far from Frank’s model garden is a much larger community garden where villagers tend small crops of maize, beans, spinach, potatoes, beetroot, and other vegetables. The garden is next door to the Umtha Welanga HIV/AIDS Treatment Centre and was begun by the Trust with the aim of providing local people with a way of growing their own food and generating an income, as well as supplying the treatment centre with a surplus of fresh vegetables. This it does.

Good nutrition is an essential part of the fight against HIV/AIDS in the body. The better the quality of food the community garden can produce, the healthier those who are nourished by its yield can be. In teaching the local community and gardeners about alternative organic techniques, the community garden is slowly changing, becoming more intensive and producing a higher yield of better quality vegetables.

Patients from the treatment centre, members of the community, as well as anyone who is interested can spend time with Frank and Princess in their garden, learning, practising, and experiencing for themselves the overwhelming difference in the size and quality of the yield produced using simple, low-cost, conscious ways of gardening.

It is hoped that the developing knowledge of organic gardening and its methods will become an integrated part of living and growing food in every rural household in the Hamburg area. The Trust supports any practice that cultivates both the plants and the ideas necessary to change the way people understand their environment and how best to use it.