Chef, author and TV host Paul West is encouraging local residents to use gardening as a balm for the soul ahead of a local grower meet up at the Hillview Hub in Bentley on Saturday October 29.
The host of River Cottage Australia is a co-founder of Grow It Local, a grass roots, purpose-driven mission to get more people growing, sharing and eating locally grown foods.
He said gardening encompasses the whole community and every skill level – even those who don’t have the greenest of thumbs.
“The sole purpose of Grow it Local is to get more people growing gardens, particularly food gardens,” he said.
“We want everyone to be able to grow a garden in some way or another, even if it’s as simple as sitting and observing the world and being a passive gardener, right up to being a fully green-thumbed Yoda-level master gardener, where families are growing a great deal of their own vegetables.
“Really, it’s about getting people to come together as a group of growers, because so much that we do as gardeners happens in isolation in our backyards.
“We’ve just come off a strange period in human history with the pandemic and now it’s about getting that celebration of people face-to-face and realising that when you’re growing a garden, you’re not really just doing it in isolation, you are part of a collective group of people who are growing their own food and the impacts of that action are really quite profound.”
With the seemingly constant rise of food prices, he said growing your own food wasn’t the primary driver, but was certainly an important element of the program.
“It’s more about body, mind and soul but prices aren’t going backwards, and for the first time many people have seen empty shelves in the supermarket, so that illusion of food security is shattered a little bit.
“Now we see a lot of people growing their own food and in the coming years I think that’s going to increase, growing food as a balm for the soul and to weather some uncertain times.
“It can be as simple as growing some herbs on a sunny window-sill.”
City of Canning residents can join Paul West for the Local Grower Meet Up on Saturday October 29 from 11am to 1pm, at Hillview Hub, Bentley.
