Pretoria: The Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, will on Tuesday attend Arbor Day celebrations at the eThekwini Municipality at Mpumalanga stadium in Hammarsdale, KwaZulu-Natal.

The event will be hosted by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in partnership with Total South Africa, eThekwini Municipality and the KZN Provincial Department of Agriculture and Environmental Affairs.

The National Arbor Week campaign is celebrated annually from 1 – 7 September under the theme ‘Our Forests – Our Future’.

The launch will see Joemat-Pettersson and her counterparts physically establishing 150 food gardens and distributing more than 3 500 vegetable and seed packs, and 3 000 trees.

Projects that will be visited tomorrow include:

Botanic Gardens. About seven trees will be planted in honour of women leaders since the country recently celebrated Women’s Month;
Priority Zone Rooftop Gardens. The Priority Zone Rooftop Gardens is a social project established to address greening and issues of food security in areas where there is no space to establish gardens in the city centres. The gardens were established, using recycled products, including old tyres, drums and pallets. Produce from the gardens is donated to the needy.
Minitown (Hammarsdale). As part of the legacy projects for eThekwini, about 150 households will receive vegetable seedlings and seed packs as the first phase of the household food security project in Minitown.