Dhruba Raj Bhattarai¹ , Giri Dhari  Subedi¹ , Tej Prasad  Acharya¹ , Pepijn  Schreinemachers² , Ray-yu  Yang² , Greg  Luther² , Upendra  Dhungana³ , Krishna P.  Poudyal¹ , Narayan Kaji  Kashichwa⁴

1 Horticulture Research Division, Nepal Agricultural Research Council, Government of Nepal
2 AVRDC-The World Vegetable Center, Sanahau, Tainan, Taiwan
3 Department of Health Service, Ministry of Health, Government of Nepal
4 Department of Education, Ministry of Education, Government of Nepal
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Horticulture, 2015, Vol. 5, No. 20   doi: 10.5376/ijh.2015.05.0020
Received: 29 Aug., 2015    Accepted: 10 Sep., 2015    Published: 14 Dec., 2015

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Bhattarai D.R., Subedi G.D., Acharya T.P., Schreinemachers P., Yang R., Luther G., Dhungana U., Poudyal K.P., and Kashichwa N.K., 2015, Effect of school vegetable gardening on knowledge, preference and consumption of vegetables in Nepal, International Journal of Horticulture, 5(20): 1-7 (doi: 10.5376/ijh.2015.05.0020)

The present study attempts to explore the effects of school vegetable gardening as a learning tool to improve knowledge, awareness and preference for vegetable consumption among the school children in Nepal. Thirty schools from hills (Dolakha and Ramechhap districts) were randomly selected to identify the nutritional outcomes of school vegetable gardens by using a randomized control trial (RCT) design. Students in the treatment group participated in a 23-weeks garden based nutrition activities. The treatment schools were evaluated using a pre and post intervention data collected from students (n= 1275) of grade 6 and 7. Post intervention findings of the study significantly resemble the higher level of awareness & preference (p<0.01) towards the consumption of nutrient dense vegetables in treatment schools. Students who participated in garden-based intervention increased their level of knowledge (7.80) on vegetables and nutrition, more than the students in control group (5.92).

Nutrition; Student; School garden; Vegetables