Dig It and Eat It!
Autumn 2004 brought a new direction to Green Gym - the Dig It and Eat It! Project. By teaching participants about fruit and vegetable growing and lessons about improving one’s diet, the project will hopefully bring a lasting change in lifestyle to the people involved. The new initiative focuses on the combination of diet and physical health as the key for well-being and fitness.
Co-ordinated from Conservation Volunteers' Belfast Office, the project covers four groups from four health trusts around Belfast for three years. The groups were invited to apply for project support and were chosen to target the social needs in the local area. The Ardmonagh Women’s Group has a number of raised beds and a polytunnel. In Newtownards, clients Ards New Horizons have built a vegetable garden within their grounds. The third garden, in a Downpatrick schoolground, involves pupils, their parents and people from the local community centre. The fourth group, of older people, is at the Salvation Army Temple in East Belfast and also has a number of raised beds.
A dietician from the Eastern Health Board completes the project with fortnightly sessions on nutritional education. The combination of physical activity, horticultural training, and nutritional know-how will hopefully motivate the groups to continue with their gardens on their own when the funding ends.
The project was formally launched in July 2005 at Ards New Horizons. Famous Belfast Chef Nick Price gave a fantastic cooking demonstration using only the healthy ingredients grown by the four groups in their gardens.
This is the second year of planting and we hope to do as well as last year. Not only did we grow lots of crops, including unusual vegetables like rainbow chard and kohl rabi, we also won a number of prizes at the Autumn Fruit and Flower Show in Botanic Gardens, Belfast. This year we hope to grow an even greater selection of vegetables, sweet potatoes, black cabbage, amaranth and multi coloured carrots to name a few!
Each group is so enthusiastic and harvesting the bounty of crops in the summer and autumn certainly makes up for all the digging, manuring and seed sowing that occurs earlier. Conservation Volunteers' idea is now bearing fruit (and vegetables!) across Northern Ireland!
The Fruit and Vegetable Garden Project is supported financially by the Big Lottery Fund under the Coronary Heart Disease, Stroke and Cancer Prevention Programme.