Category — Horticulture Therapy

Amy Lint giving a tour at the New Roots Community Farm. Photo by Kristin Kvernland.

The garden not only gave them a way to contribute but gave them a way to shine.

By Jill Richardson
Latitude News
January 30, 2012

Excerpt:

Imagine escaping from your farm in a war-riven part of Africa or Asia. You arrive in the U.S. What a relief! But you’ve replaced farming with asphalt and concrete of a U.S. city. Bewilderment, shock, all over again.

To help refugee farmers adjust, the International Rescue Committee started an urban farm in San Diego. It hired Amy Lint, then 31, to get New Roots Community Farm up and running.

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Much like eating greens provides essential nutrients, so does seeing and being around green

By Frances E. (Ming) Kuo, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Director, Landscape and Human Health Laboratory University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
2010

Excerpt from the Executive Summary

This monograph presents an overview of what scientists have discovered about the relationship between nature and human health, focusing on the most compelling findings. It focuses on three classic indicators of health drawn from animal research. Studies of laboratory and zoo animals, as well as animals in the wild living in degraded and fragmented habitat tells us that organisms living in unfit habitats undergo social, psychological, and physical breakdown. The scientific study of what Richard Louv has coined “nature deficit disorder” in people mirrors the animal research on unfit habitats. When we compare people with more versus less ready access to parks and other green environments, we find that they exhibit differences in well-being and functioning in each of the three trademark domains: social, psychological, and physical health.

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Inmates working at the farm. Photo by John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative.

“We need to be cautious about our expectations that any single intervention is going to work, is going to keep people from going back to prison.”

By Don Terry
New York Times
September 17, 2011

Excerpt:

Mr. Jones’s life in the street landed him in jail for 15 months beginning in early 2009 before a judge gave him a break and instead of sending him to prison for carjacking, sent him to the Cook County Sheriff’s military-style boot camp. There, behind the razor wire, he discovered a three-quarter-acre vegetable farm that produces tomatoes, kale, carrots, peppers and hope.

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Potato Harvest Day – Students at Queen Mary Elementary School work with Summerhill Seniors

Video by Charlie Miller and Damian Inwood
The Edible Garden Project

Excerpts:

Two years ago the Queen Mary Community Garden was built in North Vancouver. Included in the garden were four large plots dedicated to the students at Queen Mary Elementary School – right next door.

Students take part in planning, planting, and maintaining the garden plots for their classroom. We work with students from grade 3, 5, and 7. They each have a compost bucket in their classrooms that they empty in the garden composters; a great was to learn about closing the loops between food waste and helping their garden grow.

See more here.

A Richmond Villages resident tends a healthy crop of rhubarb.

Seniors Celebrate National Allotments Week 8 – 14 August 2011

Green-fingered residents at Richmond Northampton, the award winning retirement village built and operated by Richmond Villages in Grange Park, are keeping fit and enjoying each others’ company while growing their own food on their allotments. A bumper crop is expected this summer as they celebrate National Allotments Week.

National Allotments Week, run by the National Society of Allotments and Leisure Gardeners, is a great opportunity to demonstrate just how much fun allotments can be. For those who have sold their homes and gardens to retire to Richmond Northampton, time out tending plants is still possible thanks to some local allotments.

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Carver Community Garden on 124th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues in Harlem.

That is a gift the garden gives to all who pass it, even if they never set foot inside its gates.

By Sarah Goodyear
Grist
19 July, 2011

Excerpt:

I emerged from the subway at 125th St. and Lexington Ave. into the most oppressive kind of urban summer scene. Heat billowed off the asphalt and concrete. Exhaust fumes stung my eyes and throat. Car engines roared. Horns blared. The sun beat down on the thronged sidewalk. It felt like I was being pressed into the pavement.

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The Atlanta Union Mission has transformed a vacant downtown lot into a garden filled with raised vegetable beds that are tended daily by the very men who inhabit the shelter and whose bounty will benefit the shelter’s kitchen. Photo from Atlanta Union Mission.

“Our own little Garden of Eden.”

By Adeline Chen
CNN – Eatocracy
May 16, 2011

Excerpt:

“We eat what we get. It’s not like I can say ‘I’m going to eat something healthy,’” says Joel, a resident of a downtown Atlanta shelter.

For Joel, and other homeless people like him, having a meal does not mean choosing between an organic pear and gorgonzola salad or locally-grown arugula with artisanal cheese. Instead, food options boil down to one thing: sustenance. The food is received mostly by donation, which means it’s often cheap, non-perishable, and generally less than healthy.

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Group empowers people with developmental disabilities

News Release
May 5, 2011

Event in Vancouver BC:
Saturday, May 14, 2011. Garden build 8:00am – 5:00 pm. At: 4410 Kaslo Street, Vancouver (across from the 29th Ave Sky Train Station)

‘Can You Dig It’ is an urban agriculture and community development initiative hosted by posAbilities, a not for profit organization that empowers people with developmental disabilities. In partnership with MOSAIC immigrant settlement services and the Simon Fraser Society for Community Living, a new 50 plot community inclusive garden will be developed at 4410 Kaslo Street in Vancouver. Para Space Landscape Inc. had generously donated over $11,000 of expertise, time and materials to this garden, and the City of Vancouver has offered the land. Over 100 volunteers will work shoulder to shoulder on May 14 to build the site in just one day!

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Robert Lewis Reid (American painter, 1862-1929) The Old Gardener 1920

non·a·ge·nar·i·an – A person who is from 90 to 99 years old

By Deanna Duke
Crunchy Chicken
March 3, 2011

Excerpt:

A few weekends ago I went to a book release party and ended up hanging out with the parents-in-law of the author. The dad had a birthday coming up that week and was turning 91. His wife was also turning 91 this year, in August.

I don’t know how we got on the topic, but our conversation turned to gardening, raising chickens and canning. They had been doing it all for decades and still grew a huge amount of food in their yard and canned like fiends every year.

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By The Huffington Post

The Fountain House, a working community for people with mental illness in New York City, has developed a program for its members to grow their own food using a unique hydroponic growing system.

The hydroponic garden has proved both therapeutic and healthy.

Link here.

Waterview Community Garden Project

Report to Investors Group, Victoria Branch
Pacifica Housing Advisory Association
Report compiled by David Stott, Project Coordinator
December 14, 2010

The following report outlines the progress of the Waterview Community Garden Project, which took place between February and November, 2010. The project was dedicated to the creation of a community garden at Waterview Apartments in Victoria, a 49 unit residence whose tenants are formerly homeless and at risk Victoria residents.

What the project achieved

A total of 12 tenants began taking part in Waterview community garden project in February of this year. Each tenant had a different challenge or disability including various types of mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or chronic depression-physical disabilities such as 10% vision;

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March 3, 2009. The very beginning. Katherine and Jen cut sod and begin rolling, in preparation for the market gardens.

Each month the market garden supplies fresh produce to the Pearson Community kitchen

Farmers on 57th at George Pearson Centre
Vancouver, BC
Summary, November 2010

George Pearson Centre is a home for 120 adults with disabilities. The people who live here require specialized assistance as a result of disability, such as multiple sclerosis, spinal cord and traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy, or a variety of other conditions.

Market Gardens

In our market gardens, 5 hard working young urban farmers have transformed lawn into a ½ acre organic urban farm—first selling at Farmer’s markets in 2009, then shifting to a CSA (Community supported Agriculture) program in 2010. Participating families receive a fresh-picked organic harvest box each week through spring/summer, and their children see where and how their food is grown.

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Joyce Dixon examines her spearmint. Photo by Matthew Kelly.

“This garden teaches us to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables”

By Matthew Kelly
Brooklynink
August 15, 2010
The Brooklyn Ink is devoted to news and features from the borough of Kings. The staff of the Ink, composed entirely of students at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism , works tirelessly to bring you breaking news, multimedia and longer features five days a week.

Excerpt:

Standing over her garden, Joyce Dixon leaned down to weed the soil, tending to her patch of young tomato plants. The summer air was thick and sticky with 90-degree heat. Dixon stood up to wipe the dark skin of her brow, she shook the dirt off her t-shirt and gave a smile.

“I grew up on a farm as a little one,” she said, “and this brings me back.”

Dixon’s farm was on the island of Jamaica, but now it is in the East New York section of Brooklyn. She’s 65 years old and is a volunteer gardener at East New York Farms!, which is a program of the United Community Center. On Saturdays, she tends her patch at the youth farm behind the center, where interns help volunteer gardeners.

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Stressed out Tokyo city dwellers try to get in touch with their traditional farming roots.

Reuters
05/22/2009

SANBU, JAPAN – Farming just got fashionable in Japan, where scores of stressed-out urbanites are spending their weekends trudging through mud to painstakingly plant rice by hand and, hopefully, find themselves.

Growing concerns over food safety and the environment, and the ideal of a laid-back rural lifestyle, are attracting more urbanites to agriculture, once the mainstay of Japan’s economy.

Popular for years among retirees, part-time agriculture courses are now drawing younger professionals seeking a break from the rat-race and a space to call their own.

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Photo by by Josh Sommers

Broken Spirit on Earth Day

By Serita “Green” Newell

During the summer of 2009, at the peak of harvesting, when tomatoes were ripe and ready to be picked, a female neighbor, along with three of her friends or relatives, stole vegetables out of my father’s garden. My father, Henry Green, caught them in the act and asked them to leave his property and when he turned his back, they were about to go back into the garden again. So again, he told them to leave off of his property. I was very upset about what they did and wanted to speak to them directly; however, my father asked me not to and out of respect I did nothing.

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By The National Trust
2009

Excerpts:

Gardens connect people with food

21 per cent of people have taken up gardening to grow their own fruit and vegetables.

The Trust now cares for 26 working kitchen gardens, from Trengwainton, Cornwall, to Wallington, Northumberland. At the magnificent 2.5 acre kitchen garden at Knightshayes Court in Devon we work with local schools who now come on a regular basis to tend their plots and learn about growing
food.

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In this December 1914 photograph, a British soldier of the London Rifle Brigade poses proudly behind his garden, festooned with stoneware rum jugs (on the extreme right). In the months to come, this location at Ploegsteert Wood in the Ypres Salient in Belgium would become the scene of horrific fighting. From the NPR website – from Imperial War Museum.

Kenneth Helphand published Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime in 2006.

“Kenneth Helphand, writes about war gardens — not just victory gardens, grown in time of scarcity, but those planted on hostile fronts, including Eastern Europe’s ghettos and the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II. Helphand calls the gardens an act of defiance.”

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Aboriginal Community Kitchen Gardens at UBC Farm, Vancouver, BC

Since 2002, members of the Musqueam First Nation have grown vegetables on the farm site for their community kitchen project. With an interest in expanding the potential benefits of this community nutrition project, the farm initiated a new pilot program in 2005. In collaboration with 17 different agencies working on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), a plot of land on the farm is dedicated towards the DTES Aboriginal Community Kitchen Garden Project.

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All the way from Byron Bay, Australia, Lesley Bayliss describes an herb business she started for people with intellectual disabilities. Part of the program is funded by the herbs that clients grow. Sales are upwards of $50,000 per year, all grown on a half acre of land in an industrial area of town. Over 150 varieties of herbs for sale:

Bush Tucker
Lemon Myrtle (backhousia citriodora)
Davidsons Plum (davidsonia pruriens)

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See a short-documentary on guerrilla gardening starring Richard Reynolds, the author of “On Guerrilla Gardening.” The piece basically shows the process, preparation and troops needed to go out on a gardening mission.
From Current TV.

Link with comments on Current TV here.