The increase in the urban population, the decrease in agricultural lands and the decrease in agricultural productivity make access to healthy food increasingly difficult. Urban agricultural practices including kitchen gardening, terrace gardening and roof gardening stand out as the most important alternatives to find solutions to this problem.

The Food Engineering and Landscape Architecture departments of the Near East University Faculty of Agriculture, which was established a year ago, give priority to studies aimed at increasing productivity and product quality in urban agriculture in accordance with the requirements of the present needs. Determining rural agriculture, local agriculture, evaluation of local seeds, food health, permaculture and good agricultural practices as priority areas of study, Near East University Faculty of Agriculture has started a new research project on the effects of different soil types on vegetable cultivation.

The project, carried out by Muhammed Adeel, a student of the Near East University Faculty of Agriculture, Department of Landscape Architecture, aims to lead the inhabitants of the island to grow quality agricultural products in small areas with urban agricultural practices and to facilitate access to agricultural products. Within the scope of the study, regular soil analyzes are carried out to control the nutrient richness of the growing medium applied with different soil types. Soil analyzes are carried out jointly with the Near East University and the Güzelyurt Soil Laboratory affiliated to the Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

The project consists of three phases
The project, which aims to determine how various soil types affect productivity in the production of various vegetables in urban farming practices, consists of three phases. It is observed how agricultural productivity changes in beds created using “simple soil”, “soil and manure mixture” and “soil mixture, farm manure mixture, peat and perlite”. While onion, lettuce and pepper are used as the main products within the scope of the project, the applications to be tried will be in duplicate. A number of parameters will be recorded for each application, such as the number of leaves, plant length, height, stem diameter and fruit weight. The data will be analyzed in accordance with these characteristics and which method gives the best results under the given conditions will be determined.