What We Did — Balanced Bites

Chapter 01

Spreading Awareness

We had two problems facing each other: plastic with nowhere to go, and gardens with nothing to grow in.

Addressing our school

Poster headed Malnutrition, explaining that malnutrition is an imbalance between the nutrients the body needs and the nutrients it receives, with three causes and three ways to prevent it — What malnutrition is, and how to prevent it

Poster headed Take care, watch them grow: six steps for looking after seedlings at school, from watering gently to observing and recording — Six steps for keeping seedlings alive at school

Chapter 02

At Our School

The preparation of bottles by soiling and stringing

A bottle being cut open along a marked line

Drainage holes being made in the base of a bottle

Bottles being filled with a soil and compost mix

Planting and watering

Close-up of a young kale seedling held in a hand

Students sorting collected bottles by size

A sack of empty, dusty plastic bottles collected from homes

The same bottles washed, cut open and planted with green seedlings

Before After

Chapter 03

At Oasis

Addressing to Oasis

The speech at the training centre

Two students putting the malnutrition poster up on a wall at the vocational training centre — Putting it up at the training centre in Mathare

Planting the Future

Planting day was loud, muddy, and the best day of the project so far.

Each seedling went into its bottle roots first, soil pressed in gently around the stem, then watered straight away so the soil settles against the roots instead of leaving air pockets.

Two students holding a cut bottle planted with greens, with others working on the ground behind them

A student carrying a cardboard box of collected plastic bottles along a school corridor

A student holding up a planted bottle while talking to a seated group

A mud-brick wall hung with rows of cut bottles growing kale, strawberries and onions

A collection sack at the school gate filling up with bottles

With gratitude and appreciation

The thank-you speech

Chapter 04

Watch Us Grow

Planting takes one afternoon. Keeping things alive takes every week after that, and it is where most school gardens quietly die.

So we wrote the care work down and put names against it. This is the actual rota from our noticeboard.

Our care routine
How often	What we do	Why it matters
Every morning	Water lightly, before the sun is high	Bottles are small and dry out fast; midday water mostly evaporates
Every morning	Look under the leaves	Aphids and whitefly hide there and are easy to stop early
Twice a week	Pull weeds out by hand	In a bottle, a weed drinks the water the crop needed
Weekly	Measure and photograph one marked bottle	Growth is slow to notice, and obvious in two photos side by side
Monthly	Top up compost, check drainage holes	Holes block, soil compacts, roots suffocate

A progress update from the organization we supported

Chapter 05

Growing Food, Growing Knowledge

The name is Balanced Bites for a reason. Growing kale is only half of it — knowing why the kale belongs on the plate is the other half.

Alongside the garden we run short talks, ten minutes at a time, on what a balanced plate actually looks like. Six things, none of them expensive.

Fruit & vegetables

The largest share of the plate. Colour is a rough guide — the more colours across a week, the wider the range of vitamins.
Proteins

Beans, lentils, eggs, fish, meat. Growth, repair and immunity. Beans do much of the same job as meat for a fraction of the price.
Carbohydrates

Ugali, rice, potatoes, bread. The fuel. Whole-grain versions release energy slower and keep you full for longer.
Healthy fats

Groundnuts, avocado, seeds, cooking oil in sensible amounts. Fat is not the enemy; it is how the body takes in vitamins A, D, E and K.
Vitamins & minerals

Iron, calcium, vitamin A, vitamin C. Mostly they arrive with the vegetables — which is exactly the part that gets dropped first.
Water

Free, forgotten, and needed for every single process above. Clean water beside the food, not sugary drinks instead of it.

One thing we learned the hard way: growing a vegetable does nothing if it is then boiled to death. Half of our nutrition talk is now about cooking greens briefly, in a little water, with the lid on.