Fifteen-Minute Gardening- Sustainable Agriculture

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by Peter Emau One common challenge in sustainable agriculture is finding enough time for growing healhty foods. At this time of COVID pandemic, most people are forced to work from home. Therefore, there is an opportunity to allocate time (break time) for gardening. We tested one option of dividing the garden into plots equivalent to tasks that can be completed within 15-minutes, assuming one takes a 15-minute break and spends that time to complete a sepecific garden task (e.g, sowing, planting, weeding, harvesting) on a single plot. We divided the garden into 6ft x 6ft plots ( i.e 2 meters x 2 meters) for which such a a specific garden task can be completed by one person within 15 minutes. The size of the plot may vary for each person. This 15-minute break provides not only healthy mental and physical activity for the brain and body (that can be beneficial for the work), it provides time for grow healthy foods. Below is an examples of garden plots:

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