GROW Community Gardens
GROW is an acronym for ‘Gardening for Resilience and Optimal Wellbeing’ This garden provides space for community groups to grow vegetables, teach people how to grow fruit and vegetables and grow people into gardeners.
Park Avenue,
MASTERTON
The GROW goal is to feed the most vulnerable people in our community with healthy, nutrient dense, organic vegetables and provide a space for a diverse community to learn all things growing. It is a place to share ideas, find mental health and wellbeing, conserve and recycle and discover the natrual environment and what the ground can produce.
The current vegetable, berry, and fruit garden is approximately 700 sqm and is only 1 year old. Wairarapa Community Centre Trust (WCCT) approached St Matthews church to use the land that had once had gardens (at that time derelict). In recognition of identified community need, WCCT initially had funding from the Department of Internal Affairs to set up the garden infrastructure ( water tank, garden beds, tools, tool shed, little shop, tunnel house and chicken house).
The GROW model…
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… sees gardens allocated to Wairarapa’s social agencies who grow food with their clients, while other plots are community-based to grow food to contribute to WCCT’s distribution of 10,000 emergency meals per annum.
In this garden, tourers will find practical ideas and inspiration for their home garden with a variety of vegetables, herbs, berries, espaliered fruit trees, companion plants, potatoes growing in coffee sacks, no dig lasagne gardening, compost making, worm farm, bug hotels and chicken enrichment ideas.
WCCT garden volunteers will be on hand to share tips and ideas and we will have for sale vegetable seedlings, eggs, and other garden products e.g. wooden seed-raising boxes. All sale proceeds will go back into the gardens. There will also be a fun board where you can ‘post’ and share your own clever ideas and tips.
The focus here is budget-friendly, practical tips and ideas on how you can create an organic, sustainable garden that will give you the peace of mind of food resilience.
There will be a mini Market Fair at the GROW garden so bring cash to get Christmas treats, delicious food, and plants for your garden.
There will also be awesome talks from wise people on gardening – how to lasagne garden, garden for life, organic and permaculture gardening and soil health. These sessions are to be held at 10am, 12pm and 2pm and are approximately 45 mins long with the opportunity to ask our experts all your questions on gardening!
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SATURDAY |
SUNDAY |
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Time |
Speaker |
Topic |
Time |
Speaker |
Topic |
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10am |
Helen Dew |
Sustainable gardening |
10am |
Beverley Jack |
Lasagne gardening |
|
12pm |
Josje & Frank van Steensel |
Soil health |
12pm |
Josje & Frank van Steensel |
Organics & permaculture |
|
2pm |
Beverley Jack |
Worm Farming |
2pm |
Helen Dew |
Sustainable gardening |
GALLERY
