LPFN Food Growing Garden

Our project aims to encourage intergenerational learning about sustainable food production by creating a food growing garden and training our staff, volunteers and beneficiaries so that they can work, grow and cook together.

We partnered with Keep Wales Tidy to secure a development package to set up a food growing garden at The Game Change Project, Aberhafesp. The package was funded by Local Places for Nature and provided everything we needed to get started. Before the garden was installed, thanks to the Localities Initiative funding, we were able to take two groups of young people, together with staff and volunteers to Cultivate in Newtown where they learned some basic horticultural and cooking skills. Following on from the training our participants got stuck in building raised beds, constructing a green house and laying paths. They were joined by members of MenShed, Newtown who came to lend a hand on Tuesday 27th Sept and really enjoyed working alongside our young people out in the fresh air. Under the guidance of the Keep Wales Tidy team, we completed the installation during the first week in October and planted our first crops. We are now looking forward to our third workshop delivered by Cultivate, this time at our brand-new food growing area at TGCP! This session will give us the knowledge we need to get the most of our plot and also upskill our staff and volunteers to take the project forward. The project will enable us to share food growing and cooking experiences with people of all ages, many of whom would not normally engage in outdoor activities. Our garden will be used by members of the veteran's community and other local groups who would benefit from social and wellbeing activities outdoors. An unexpected success of the project has been that it has made us much more aware of our environmental impact as an organisation. Almost all of our waste is now either recycled, composted, or fed to the animals on our farm. Our aim is to become as self-sufficient as possible by using our own resources and wasting nothing!

Keep Wales Tidy, Cultivate, MenShed Newtown, Passport Rotary, TGCP volunteers and participants. For more information, see www.thegamechangeproject.co.uk https://www.facebook.com/thegamechangeproject