July 11th – Join a Community Gardening Initiative (Suggested Activity)
There are loads of gardening resources online that are great for getting your community using their green fingers and growing their own food. Here, we highlight GIY– an Irish not for profit social enterprise that supports over 8,000 community food groups, and we encourage you to get involved at home. Their Grow It Forward campaign is a brilliant project for members of your gardening group to take on from the comfort of their own homes.
What You Need:
- Green spaces for gardening
- Gardening Tools
- Seeds
Steps:
Register your GIY group on Change X
Visit the GIY page on the Change X website to register your neighbourhood’s gardening group. This will create a profile for your group that other people can find online and join.
There are loads of great resources on the site to help get your group up and running!
Naturally, all steps need to be adapted to keep safe-social distancing in mind. For example, when launching your group, do it in a neighbours garden or outdoor green space that leaves enough room for people to be together while standing 2 metres apart.
Get your neighbours gardening
Invite your neighbours to join a Whatsapp or Facebook group where they can keep in touch about all the local community gardening initiatives and gardening groups. Use flyers to reach out to cocooners and the senior members of your community who you can’t reach online.
Grow It Forward
GIY launched their national call to action, Grow It Forward, as a response to the COVID-19 crisis. Their goal is to get people growing their own food at home, and giving them the skills and knowledge to do so successfully.
This is a great initiative to get the GIY group in your area involved in, and a great way to keep cocooners involved in gardening activities.
The challenge is to grow something for yourself and 10 others. All you need are seeds, and a space for planting! Anywhere from a seed box to a spot in your back garden will do.
You can find seed packages, free online growing courses and a vegetable directory guide on the GIY website.
Get growing!
Get started by putting together your own seed bundles to drop into neighbours and encourage them to join in and grow their own vegetables. Check out Irish Seed Savers, a helpful website that can provide packs of organic seeds.
This is a brilliant and easy initiative for any gardening group or neighbourhood, and a great first project for people to work on at home. This way, cocooners and members of the community who are still in isolation can join in as well.
It’s a lovely opportunity to grow food for your fellow-neighbour, an act of kindness anyone would appreciate. Plus, it advances people’s knowledge in food-growing and can make for some great conversations on gardening tips with your group along the way!