Home Gardeners Feed the Hungry

Today guest blogger Toni Salter explores the mental, physical and wellbeing benefits of getting close to mother earth and growing our own produce. Let’s learn a little more about Toni.

Toni Salter runs horticultural therapy programs, developing sensory gardens through a number of organisations including AFFORD (Australian Foundation For Disability). She also has a passion to see organic principles adopted by everyone. She has helped hundreds of people, grow great tasting, healthy food in their own backyards – from inner city balconies to those living on acres and everything in-between.

As a qualified horticulturist, Toni, “The Veggie Lady”, has been teaching community education classes both privately, at her home, as well as through various community colleges and local councils around Sydney since 2003. She is a member of the Australian Institute of Horticulture (MAIH). She also offers staff training in therapeutic gardening programs so others can take the journey too. See for details.

She has also featured as a talk-back guest on ABC Radio helping gardeners solve their gardening problems organically. To help as many people as she can, The Veggie Lady has developed on-line information, resources and iphone apps to help the general public to grow their own at http://theveggielady.com/. She is a regular contributor to Miranda Kerr’s blog

Toni shares this insightful story – food for thought for us all!
Why reach into your back pocket when you can reach into your back yard to help address the issue of food security and poverty in our country?

So often backyard vegetable growers end up with too much produce for themselves and give it away to other family members or friends. Sometimes it will even go to waste as the produce rots on the vines because of excess supply. This is the nature of home vegetable gardening as we often find ourselves sick of the sight of our all-too-plentiful harvest of zucchinis, beans or whatever it may happen to be that season.

Instead of letting this produce go to waste, a self confessed aging American hippy-turned-community-gardener used the internet to connect those who “have” with those who “have not”. Gary Oppenheimer became a CNN hero after setting up ampleharvest.org in 2009. The internet was a great vehicle for providing a solution to local food insecurity as food pantries around the country registered to receive donations from backyard gardeners. The concept was simple yet profound on so many levels.

The physical benefits are obvious with food supply being generated and delivered into the hands who need it most. The environmental benefits are also apparent with food production being localised. It makes positive impacts on food transport, food packaging, mechanical handling and land management. But I wonder if the benefits to mental health were even considered at the inception of this campaign.

The emotional benefits we get from growing our own produce is abundantly rewarding. We gain a sense of achievement as we see our small daily efforts producing results. The physical benefits of feeling some sunshine on our skin and enjoying time spent outdoors lifts the soul. The delight we get from making a meal using our own home grown vegetables encourages us to eat more healthily and supports the right nutrition to help overcome mental illnesses.

When anyone knows the debilitating effects of a mental illness, they know that sometimes progress is made in very small steps. By tending a vegetable garden we can make these very small steps every day and see results in such a short period of time that it can spur us on towards making other larger steps in our lives.

These are benefits for ourselves as home gardeners. But it doesn’t finish there. One aspect that is helpful in maintaining or recovering from a mental illness is to look beyond oneself. When we can focus our attention outside of our own sphere, with our perceived limitations, we suddenly see opportunity and blessing that can be given as well as taken. It puts the receiver in the place of a provider and this has a profound impact on our sense of self and perceptions on our own capacity.

Being able to bless another person with something as simple as home grown vegetables is rewarding emotionally, physically and financially. It’s something that we can all do and enjoy.