In a bid to promote agricultural development and increase tropical fruit diversity, a project named “Hobby Garden and Tropical Fruit Promotion Center” has been initiated in the southern province of Antalya’s Alanya district.
Speaking to daily Milliyet about the center,Alanya Mayor Adem Murat Yücel stated that the center is built on an area of 77,000 square meters, and is expected to include an indoor greenhouse, open greenhouse and various hobby gardens.
The project will also include services such as promenades, cafeteria, basketball court, fitness area, children’s playground, gastronomy training area and mini aromatic plant parcels.
Within the scope of the project, the municipality will carry out research and development studies on tropical fruits in order to increase diversity in agriculture, Yücel noted.
“In this region, our farmers already cultivate 18 different tropical products. We plan to deliver the saplings and products to our residents here and teach everyone how to grow them in collaboration with our universities, chamber of agriculture and farmers.”
To support rural production and contribute to employment, Mayor Yücel stated that they have distributed 400,000 seedlings to the farmers in the district so far, and they aim to take this number to a million seedlings within the year.
Emphasizing that they have implemented another project in the previous years, which enables the production of fertilizer from banana peels, the mayor said that they produce several types of organic and microbial fertilizers from the skin of bananas.
The municipality uses the banana peel fertilizer in their own production areas as well and intends to expand the project abroad in the future, Yücel added.