Speech by 2M Indranee Rajah at the Community Garden Edibles Competition Award Ceremony

Mar 20, 2021

Good morning, everyone – especially to all our gardening enthusiasts. I am very happy to be able to join you this morning for the Community Garden Edibles Competition Award Ceremony, as part of today’s Gardeners’ Day Out activities.

First, congratulations to all the winners. I saw your entries earlier, and am very impressed!

The Community Garden Edibles Competition is a fun and educational event for participants to demonstrate and level up your horticultural skills. By gathering and exchanging knowledge with fellow gardeners at events like today’s, you can help raise the skills of the whole gardening community. So, it is good that after a small break last year due to COVID-19, we have been able to resume this Gardeners’ Day Out in a hybrid format. Today, we have on-site tours, as well as a gardening masterclass that will be streamed live online!

Our gardeners will play an important role in Singapore’s transformation into a City in Nature. The pockets of urban greenery you grow, whether in community gardens or along corridors, help to beautify our island. They also have the potential to strengthen our urban ecosystems, by supporting birds, butterflies, and other pollinators. Gardening is therefore an example of how everyone can play a part in our City in Nature efforts. We can all be active stewards of our greenery and biodiversity. For instance, my constituency is working with various government partners, including NParks, to look into setting up more community gardens for resident gardening enthusiasts. Each of us can do our part. Our combined efforts, in turn, can make Singapore greener, more liveable, and more sustainable.

Growing edible plants also helps to raise awareness of the value of food, and the need to reduce food waste. We learn to better appreciate the efforts of our local farmers as well. Gardening with edibles complements our “30 by 30” push to produce 30% of our nutritional needs in Singapore by 2030. This is part of our strategy to strengthen food security and build greater social resilience.

More Support for Edible Horticulture

We want to continue growing our gardening community, and support more gardening with edibles. This morning, I would like to share with you some updates on our Edible Horticulture Masterplan, which we launched in 2017. The Masterplan aims to provide more space and training for gardeners of all skill levels to grow edible plants, and introduce more varieties of edible plants and gardening technologies. We also want to reach out to more people to take up gardening of such plants.

For example, NParks introduced the Allotment Gardening Scheme, to allow individuals who wish to have dedicated plots for gardening to rent allotment garden plots from NParks. Today, we have more than 1,700 plots across 20 parks island-wide as part of the scheme. Currently, these are fully subscribed, and we are very heartened by this overwhelming response. So, I am glad to share that we will be opening up more than 230 allotment garden plots for registration today! These will be located at Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park, Clementi Woods Park, Punggol Park, and right here at HortPark.

To guide new allotment gardeners as they embark on their gardening journey, NParks is also launching an online guide on Good Allotment Gardening Practices, to share tips on good gardening practices and etiquette.

Since 2017, NParks has introduced more than 50 interesting plant varieties from Pasir Panjang Nursery to community gardens and to the public as well. Interested gardeners can purchase these at HortPark, or at our monthly Gardeners’ Day Out events.

Many of you may also recall that last year, we launched the Gardening with Edibles initiative, to encourage Singaporeans to grow edible plants at home, with your families. Today, we are opening for registration for another 3,000 free seed packs, to help more gardeners grow edible plants such as radish, cauliflower, and pumpkin. For example, the attendees of today’s gardening masterclass on growing root vegetables will each receive a packet of radish seeds. I hope you will enjoy growing them, and apply what you learn from the masterclass! These varieties are also eligible for the next round of the Community Garden Edibles Competition, which will be held in October this year.

Finally, we want to allow more people to enjoy the benefits of gardening on our health and well-being. To facilitate this, NParks is exploring working with social enterprises to set up community urban farms in our heartlands. These could create more spaces for recreational gardening, provide gardening-related programmes for the community, and offer part-time employment opportunities for residents. We are studying how best to support such social enterprises, and will provide more details when ready.

Conclusion

To conclude, let me thank all of you, our gardeners, for being active stewards of our environment. I look forward to working with you, as we continue to expand our gardening community, and transform Singapore into a City in Nature. Thank you all very much.