WCHC ramping up for community garden season
ITS COMMUNITY GARDEN PROGRAM SET
to resume, the Woolwich Community Health Centre is looking for volunteers to help make it happen.
The garden provides an opportunity for community members to get the benefits that working in a garden can bring, while helping to provide some food to those in need, said the health center’s Margret Gohl, who is coordinating the garden.
“We call it our wellness garden. It’s a way for the community to come out and help get out in the garden... whether they don’t have their own garden or whether they want to learn to garden or just want to do something for the community,” she said, noting the fruits of the labour go to help others. “We brought it to the food bank one year. This year, we had people from the senior apartments in town say that they could use some of the produce as well.”
The health centre has both a vegetable garden
and a native plant garden that flourish with volunteer help from September to May, said health
promoter Tariq Abdulhadi.
“The people volunteering are actually from as young as teenagers to older adults, so we’ve got a good variety of ages volunteering with us in our garden, which is great. We got a really big group this year,” he said.
To make it easier for those with mobility issues the garden will have raised beds that will be put in on the yet-to-be-determined planting day later this month.
The age range of volunteers allows the health centre to leave open what people want to do in the garden, Gohl said
“We’ve got seniors that just want to be able to dabble in the garden. They’re not going to be hauling rocks around or doing any of the heavy work, but then we’ve got younger people who might want to do some more weeding or whatever – it’s your basic maintenance,” she said.
The flower garden is part of the David Suzuki Butterfly Project, Abdulhadi noted.
“They’re kind of a trail across the region to help the butterflies along their migration path. So they