Home gardening contributes to household food security by providing direct access to food that can be harvested, prepared and fed to family members, often on a daily basis. Even very poor, landless or near landless people practise gardening on small patches of homestead land, vacant lots, roadsides or edges of a field, or in containers. Gardening may be done with virtually no economic resources, using locally available planting materials, green manures, "live" fencing and indigenous methods of pest control. Thus, home gardening at some level is a production system that the poor can easily enter.Gardening provides a diversity of fresh foods that improve the quantity and quality of nutrients available to the family. Households with gardens typically obtain from them more than 50 percent of their supply of vegetables and fruits.Homestead production is also an important source of supplementary income for poor rural and urban households around the world. The combined value of garden production, including sale of surplus vegetable produce and animal products combined with savings in food and medical expenses, varies seasonally but constitutes a significant proportion of total income (upwards of 20 percent) for many households