Workshop looks at organic gardening
It is easy to incorrectly guess Dee Pigneguy’s age.
The 70-year-old has a glow about her which she puts down to eating nutrientdense organic food.
It’s a way of life she is hoping to inspire more people to take up through her Gardening for Health workshop at the Dig It! Royal Oak Organic Garden.
The author’s healthy lifestyle comes from being brought up on a farm in the Canadian wilderness.
‘‘If we didn’t grow it, shoot it or catch it, then we didn’t eat it.’’
But she says on the whole people now have too much ready-made ‘‘fake food’’ handed to them on a plate.
‘‘When people go to the supermarket now it is just refined sugar, refined sugar, refined sugar,’’ she says.
‘‘I would hate to be raising a child in today’s society.
‘‘I would constantly be trying to keep them away from the television, away from movies, away from malls – all these things and places where they are constantly being told what to eat.’’
Pigneguy says people need to head back to their roots and back to the garden, to remember the way things used to be.
‘‘If you were pregnant you wouldn’t take iron pills, you would use nettle tea and molasses to get the nutrients, the iron, you need.’’
And the ‘‘it is too expensive’’ to eat organic argument holds no weight with Pigneguy.
‘‘You will pay for it now or you will pay for it later,’’ she says.
‘‘People need to look to food as the answer to good health.’’
Dig It! Royal Oak Organic Garden supervisor Vicky Barnett says the community garden is the perfect vehicle for the healthy eating message.
‘‘We have all these vegetables, all this fresh fruit – some of which you can’t even find in supermarkets – growing here.’’