Value of plants in Ugandan homegardens

Homegardens are complex and small scale traditional farming systems, predominantly in the humid tropics, characterized as intimate multi‐story gardens around homesteads, designed to meet household consumption needs and produce for markets. They are diverse agroforestry systems containing a variety of crops and indigenous plants with an associated diversity of traditional knowledge. Little is known about this diversity in the highland homegardens of the Ugandan Southwest. The study described aimed to bridge this gap. The work described is based on interviews and homegarden inventories with 102 farmers in the Greater Bushenyi region in 2014 and 2015. Categorization of plants into different uses by farmers was done using the quantitative ethnobotany indices including, most importantly, the use report (UR), which occurs when a species is mentioned or observed being used for a certain defined use‐category and the cultural importance index (Whitney et al. 2018).ReferencesWhitney, Cory W., Eike Luedeling, John R. S. Tabuti, Antonia Nyamukuru, Oliver Hensel, Jens Gebauer, and Katja Kehlenbeck. 2018. Crop diversity in homegardens of southwest Uganda and its importance for rural livelihoods. Agriculture and Human Values 35: 399–424. doi:10.1007/s10460-017-9835-3.