RAWALPINDI, July 18: The Commissioner, Zahid Saeed, on Monday asked the city residents to promote kitchen gardening and assured that the district authorities would provide them seed on subsidised rates.

He said this while holding a meeting with DCOs and agriculture officials of the district to implement chief minister’s kitchen gardening programme.

He said the purpose of promoting kitchen gardening inside houses was to encourage people to reduce their dependency on market vegetables. Though majority of people in the congested Rawalpindicity lives in houses built on less than five marla areas, yet the district administration has planned to sell out 2100-seed packet among the residents on subsidised rates.

The meeting was told that seed would be provided to residents from the first week of the next month as the season for winter vegetable would begin in August.

“Kitchen gardening has become very important nowadays in order to fill the gap of demand and supply. It needs no labour to plow seed inside a house which will meet the demand of a 6-member family. People must take advantage of the new idea,” Commissioner Rawalpindi Zahid Saeed told Dawn.

He said that ‘demonstration plots’ would be made in urban and rural localities in order to make awareness of kitchen gardening among the people and attract them to manage vegetable for themselves inside their houses.