The sow and grow project

The Sow and Grow project is based in East Manchester at a supported housing project that is owned and run by the charity NACRO for men recovering from substance misuse issues. The project itself is a real collaborative effort between the men living at the House who decided that they wanted to do a growing project, and ourselves Bolton Urban Growers who are delivering the project, NACRO are funding and managing this project and others that are currently running at their supported houses around the North of England. The project started at the beginning of July and will run up until the middle of September of this year culminating in an open day where residents will get the chance to talk about some of the produce they have grown and food preparations from the project which they have prepared and preserved.

The permaculture input

The sow and grow project is very much a permaculture inspired project, all the plants that are growing in the hostel garden will be used by residents of the hostel, everything it being grown organically, house food waste is composted or put into a wormery which is used directly on the raised beds, and some of the plants that we are growing will be left to go to seed to ensure a stock of seed for next years crop. Within a permaculture context the food garden that we are making is very low in terms of putting new inputs into it, and will be able to maintain a high level of soil fertility due to on site outputs in the composting and wormery as I mentioned above. The people care element of the project is the residents high level of involvement in what they wanted from the course, and also some level of well being that comes from working in the garden in summer and having access to cleanly grown organic food, which would be out of the economic reach of all of the residents.

Learning new skills

One of the core elements of the course that I am delivering at the hostel is the learning of new and traditional skills, up to now residents have sown and planted around a dozen different types of salad leaf and lettuce, some in the raised beds in the back garden and some in trays in the small greenhouse in the garden. They have learned a little about edible flowers and uses for plants that are referred too as weeds. There has also been two sessions where residents have learnt about hot and cold pickling whilst we made pickled rat tail radish pods, pickled ginger, and pickled eggs. We also finished this weeks sessions off with a rocket stove workshop where residents helped to design and build a rocket stove from locally found recycled vegetable oil containers, after the stove was put together I cooked eggs and bacon for the residents, a job which I managed to do with the same speed as using a modern gas cooker, I was able to make egg and bacon for six people in around ten minutes, using a small amount of twigs and dried wood to fire the stove.

What do residents think of the project?

Most of the residents living in the hostel are involved in the sow and grow project, there are 6 in total who have been regularly attending the first batch of sessions. The residents have said that they are really enjoying the project because they are doing practical work and learning new things with every session. One of the residents is also thinking of becoming a gardener, whilst one has just begun volunteering a local growing project after his interest in gardening had been reignited by attending the project.

Update 1:

The sow and Grow project has been running since the beginning of July 2012, the project has been well attended by NACRO residents who are turning out to between one and three different sessions each week. In previous work I have done with people suffering with substance misuse, turn out to courses and sessions has been low due to the health problems and discordant daily lives of service users, but this a different situation here where there is a good level of enthusiasm from the residents

Supporting People

It is a credit to NACRO that they support their residents in a responsive and positive way, which has no doubt added to the high level of attendance of the sow and grow sessions, from my own end of things Bolton Urban Growers have tried to make the sessions as practical as possible with only ten minutes of the thirty hours I have delivered being in a classroom in front of a white board. We have also had a few more residents who are now regularly volunteering at the Hulme Community Garden Centre where they are learning new skills, working with other people and interacting with members of the public, from a Bolton Urban Growers position we view this as NACRO residents reconnecting with the community and society as opposed to rehabilitation, it is the reconnecting and the feeling of being useful and trusted that make inroads into developing and enhancing the well being of residents and is a formidable weapon against relapsing into old ways.

Practical skills as life skills

In our delivery of this course we have covered making rocket stoves from recycled cans, and in impromptu outdoor cooking lesson on the stove, we have also sown and eaten some of the salad from the garden. During the last month residents made two large batches of pesto from the Nasturtium leaves in the back garden. We also made black berry cordial and mint cordial, and mint sauce from the back garden. We have baked bread, made biscuits from fruit leftovers and tidied and trimmed back the bushes in the garden. We have also cooked a few midday meals from leftovers and things that we found in the main kitchen cupboard, its all been about thrift and doing as much as possible to create resources in a home environment, and particularly the Garden.

In the Future?

We had tried to pass on the skills to NACRO residents to enable them to feed themselves a good nutritional standard of food on a small budget, we have also passed on the skills of how to grow food in the home environment, and how to prepare, preserve and store that which they have grown. Many of the residents will no doubt be moving into their own places during the next few months, we hope that they will use the information and skills that have passed on to them, and that it enables them to have some sense of well being and apply the skills that they have learned in thrift and low impact living.

Update 3:

The Sow and grow project has now come to close, it has been three months of delivering a variety of traditional skills to residents who suffer with long term substance misuse issues. As I have mentioned in my writings in parts one and two of this series, the project itself is funded by the National lottery through the criminal justice charity NACRO and delivered by ourselves Bolton Urban Growers who are a small community group based in Great Lever in Bolton.

Course delivery and teaching style

From a tutoring perspective I have worked with people from different socially excluded backgrounds, and the one educational method that seems to have Universal appeal is showing people how to do practical things that they can use and incorporate into their daily lives. For the people whom I have worked with having enough stability in their lives to even contemplate going out and learning something is a difficult enough task in its self, but NACRO do offer a sense of supported continuity within their service user Houses. In terms of delivering the course I chose not to have teacher-pupil class based sessions where there would be a hierarchy in operation between myself as tutor and the residents as students. Knowledge and understanding is always a two way thing and the sow and grow course provided that this way of working was effective due to the high turn out of the sessions and some of the follow on work that the residents have voluntarily taken on.

Permaculture baseline

When I was initially approached by NACRO to carry out the sow and grow project, they asked me to deliver a course based on gardening and food preparation where their residents would learn new skills, to me this fitted perfectly with underpinning the course with Permaculture ethics and principles, this resulted in very low project costs as we made use of the inputs we already had on site, it also seemed to make people work well together and made them more resourceful.

Earth Care – No chemicals or digging involved in the course, seeds were saved, all house and garden waste composted.

People Care – Everyone’s opinions and input was valued, there was no hierarchical structure to the sessions

Fair shares – All produce grown and prepared on the project was distributed equally amongst residents