Join a Community Gardening Initiative

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Join a Community Gardening Initiative

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

Resources

GIY – a great initiative to join

Irish Seed Savers

Make It Happen!

Read: How To Approach Your Neighbours

Read: Getting Funding

We’ve put together some tips to help you make this happen in your neighbourhood, read them all here!

What To Do

1.

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!

2.

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 the senior members of your community who you can’t reach online.

3.

Sustainable Growing

Being mindful of the products we use in growing is imperative, Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is one of the most commonly used herbicides in the world by commercial gardeners. It is found to be highly toxic and can cause many short-term and long-term health effects.

To help educate those who are growing and gardening, Drugwatch have created this comprehensive guide about glyphosate and a second guide regarding non-toxic alternatives, take a look!

4.

Get growing!

You can find seed packages, free online growing courses and a vegetable directory guide on the GIY website.

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.

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!