Grow Community Gardens

There are many ways and levels of involvement with Grow Community Gardens

Core Group – It’s your garden – attend every week over a growing season

Get involved as part of the core groups who attend each week. Demand has been very high and we keep at waiting list for participation. If you think you might like this level of involvement email info@grow-ni.org and we will send you a short application form. We will then be in touch to have a chat. We have found this to be the best way of ensuring a good match. It means that generally people have a good think about whether they can commit to this level of involvement.

By being part of the core group you gain all the benefits of involvement and you get to share produce from the garden!

Occasional/Drop in

We welcome those who just want to drop in and see what we are doing, share a cup of tea, take a tour of the garden and pick the brains of our budding community gardeners.

Cooking – Healthy Eating workshops at the garden

Once we begin to harvest our produce we have regular cooking sessions followed by sharing the food cooked. This year our first cooking workshop took place on Good Friday. We harvested our first salad leaves so we had briuchetta with wild garlic pesto. The wild garlic was harvested from the Cavehill.

We will advertise our cooking sessions on the website/facebook and if you feel like coming along just drop us a text or email so we can make sure we have enough seats and food! Places are limited and will be on a first come first served basis.

Get involved in community discussion and action days

As you will now have realised – Grow community gardens are much more than just about groing veg. The community involvement is a really important one. Depending on the wishes and needs of the group, we facililitate discussions on a wide range of topics including good relations, neighbourhood issues, park cleanup, area developments, anti racism workshops, meeting local representatives.

These workshops are both informative and very empowering and many people take up a wider community involvement following these discussions.

Exchanges/Visits

We like to learn from others and share our experiences too. Last year we facilitated a number of groups and organisations visits to our gardens. We also took to the road ourselves. We organised visits between our gardens, a trip to the organic centre in Leitrim. This year we will visit the garden festival Bloom at the phoenix park in Dublin.

Our priorities for these visits are the core groups and local residents. However we often have additional places available and will offer them out to the wider community. Keep an eye on the website or face book or indeed if you are very with it – follow us on Twitter.