The Economics of Plant Production of Household Garden

The objective of this research is to investigate the economics of household plant gardening activities. The questionnaire used as a tool for data collection. The questionnaire included different parts concerning the inputs of household gardening, the processing activities and the outputs of these activities. The household population of the study was divided into different stratum according to household income and the location of households in urban and sub-urban areas. The results showed that the garden inputs are reliable on garden size. The extent of external labor use was dependent on the household income and the size of garden. The returns of household gardens were higher for trees then for vegetables.


Introduction
Household gardens are considered very important for some families in different aspects.Some families considered the household gardens as a source of income to support the family financial activities (S.Mazumdar & S. Mazumdar, 2012), other families consider gardens as a source of family food, while the third group consider garden as a recreational household activity.These attitudes will make differences for the method of considering the behavior of families for the management of household gardens.Some families considered the household garden as a source of saving food for the family, other families considered a source of economic activity (Legesse et al., 2016).In both cases, the household gardens considered a tool to alleviate poverty and improve the nutritive condition of household.
The household gardens considered small-scale activities that can face difficulties through the management activities (Galhena et al., 2013).Such private condition of household production will affect and being affected of household social and economic conditions (Ninez, 1987).On the other hand, the wide species that can be planted in household gardens will increase the challenge of household to success in this activity (Gittleman, 2009).The high variation in household gardening is considered a challenge of continuity and sustainability (Addo, 2010).
Economically, the household garden should be managed in a way that accomplish added value for families and encourage the family to continue practicing these activities (Igue et al., 2000).The extent of success of garden economically depends mainly on the way the family looking for the garden.The more serious thinking of gardens as a business will increase its potential and improve its continuity and sustainability (Coomes et al., 2004;Trinth et al., 2003;Watson et al., 2002).On the other hand, household gardening participates in job creation in different urban, sub-urban and rural areas (Kobayashi et al., 2010).
The production of household garden was affected by different factors.The most important factor is the size of the garden (Gaston et al., 2005).Garden size will affect directly the type of gardening that will be handled to be profitable with the area (Dereje, 2007;VAM, 2013), and household age composition (VAM, 2013).The planting patterns of household gardens affected by the importance of the crop for the household and the added economic value the crop provide for the family (Mohan, 2004).Garden inputs highly affected by the size of the garden and the family income as well (Vogl et al., 2002).The type of plant production was affected by the climate and region (Mohan, 2004).

Methodology
gardening plant activities according to family income and location.To accomplish this objective, questionnaire used as a tool to collect data.The questionnaire designed to collect information about the socio-economic characteristics of households, plant production practices in households' gardens.The plant production included parts that was concerned for the collection of data about the input and the output of agricultural activities of household gardens.The questionnaire was prepared and tested before the collection of the final sample.
The population of this study includes all households in urban, sub-urban, and rural that contain gardens.For the purpose of this research random sample was taken.The population of this research divided into six stratum.The income and classification of household as urban or sub-urban considered in stratifying the household population.The different strata was representing different household income levels as well as the location of household garden in urban, sub-urban and rural areas.The strata were as follow: The collected data entered and cleaned using Excel.The data classified into two major topics including plant production.Each section of data divided to socio-economic characteristics and the inflow and outflow of the gardening activities.The collected data entered to SPSS (Ver.22) for analysis.Excel was used to calculate and accumulate the expenses items and returns.

Results and Discussion
Before moving to investigate the economics of plant production, the first parts give some information about the practices taken over in household gardens.Figure 1 shows the results for method of household garden supervision and care in general by the family.The results showed that all household members contribute to care for gardens in different levels despite their working status.The results showed that the house women were in the first position to take care for household gardens (Igue et al., 2000).The results showed that the household wives effort is not enough to execute all gardens processes.This calls for hiring external labor work to fulfil the garden requirements especially for the large gardens area.
The least stratum that requires care for garden was the first stratum because of the low area and the low income of the family, while on the other hand the highest care was in the fourth stratum as this stratum almost contains higher gardens area with higher household incomes.The care for household gardens was taken over by females more males because of the larger time they spent in their homes.Practicing agricultural activities requires good experience.Most of families showed that they get the experience to take over the garden activities through their own personal experience.Some households use books and publication as a source of their knowledge to practice the agricultural activities.Also, other households use the agricultural directorates help and private companies to manage their household gardens (Table 2).The results showed wide variety of sources to get experience to handle the agricultural processes in gardens.These activities will affect widely the expenses and the returns of gardens.The expenses of production distributed among all the garden input items with different levels (Table 3).The results showed that the least expense goes for seeds, pulps, seedlings, insecticides, fungicides, acricides, and rodenticides.While the highest expenses goes for service inputs, which form the highest in the sixth stratum due to the highest garden areas and decreased with decreasing the garden area.Table 4 shows that the expenses for the inputs increases as the area of the garden increases.This pattern is applied for all plant garden inputs.The highest inputs recorded in the sixth stratum for all inputs.While the least inputs recorded in the first and second stratum as these two stratum has the least income and the lowest ability to expend on household gardens.The highest income of gardens activity was recorded for fruit trees products of about 1,731,185JD, followed by vegetables with a total return of about 95,135JD (Noble, 2010).The least returns recorded for ornamental plants of about 26,795JD.The total amount of returns of household garden activities recorded was 1,927,136JD (Table 5).The highest returns recorded for the sixth stratum for all types of products.In this stratum, households consider the household garden is a type of investment that they care for the amount of expense and the amount returns they get from their activities.In the fourth and fifth stratum, the returns were less as these two strata have intermediate to high income among the others.In the first, second and third stratum the households care for the income as it considered supported part for the household income (Table 6).The results in Table 7 showed that the net returns was higher in the sixth stratum followed by the first, second and third strata, while the returns were negative in the fourth and fifth stratum because these two do not care for the garden returns as part of the household income, they consider as a type of entertainment and recreation.

Stratum 1 :
represents the people with low income Stratum 2: represents people with low to moderate income Stratum 3: represents people from moderate to high income Stratum 4: represents the people with high income Stratum 5: represents Wadi Al Ssir Area Stratum 6: represents Amman suburbs

Table 1 .
Distribution of households by main source of finance per stratum

Table 2 .
Distribution of households by source of information on garden care and stratum

Table 3 .
Value of intermediate commodities and service inputs used in the garden by item and stratum (JD)

Table 4 .
Value of intermediate commodities used in the garden by item and area class (JD)

Table 5 .
Quantity and value of plant production

Table 6 .
Value of plant production by stratum (JD)

Table 7 .
Net profit of plant activities according to stratum