CORNWALL, Ontario – It takes a village, as they say, and the village has certainly come out in full force this year, partnering up for the annual community gardens at Hamilton Crescent and Lemay Street Housing.
The focus, as it has been in the past years, is getting resources to families to work their gardens, and also to be on site throughout the summer,” said Corrie D’Alessio, community health worker, Seaway Valley Community Health Centre, which spearheads the project.
“We’re building garden skills, particularly focusing on the kids, but also teaching families skills that can hopefully go on throughout a lifetime. This is about access and the benefits.”
The gardens are off to a great start this year thanks to several community partners including, Cornwall and Area Housing Corporation, Seaway Valley Community Health Centre, Growing Up Organic, All Things Food, Ontario Early Years Centre, Social Development Council, Cornwall and District Horticultural Society and United Way/Success by 6.
“These agencies have worked together with resident gardeners to offer families access to resources and planting skills to grow their own healthy food,” said D’Alessio.
Throughout the summer Growing Up Organic, will be offering garden workshops for children, and the Early Years Centre, along with volunteers Kimberly Cameron, Mary Fairbairn, Francine Poisson, YuXuan Lin and Jenna Seguin, will be supporting the families with fun, garden-related activities, to reinforce the skills they have learned.
“We work with schools to help them establish garden programs and help them build connections to their curriculum,” said Alain D’Aoust, regional coordinator for Growing up Organic, a program run by Canadian Organic Growers.
“This year for the first time we are translating that into the community garden environment, working with multiple age groups. We’re helping to teach and sustain garden skills so that they grow up to have those skills as they age, and learn how to prepare food, how to eat seasonally and learn over all just to have fun outside with food and plants and gardening and getting dirty.”
D’Aoust explained that they want to establish, at a young age, the ideas of being healthy, and the differences between eating from a garden, organically in particular, compared to the industrial food chain.
Weekly workshops will be held throughout the summer to teach children about such topics as composting, worms, soil and plants, when to plant them, when to harvest them and what to do with them, he said. “We’re just making it fun.”
