urban agriculture // Kelmarna Gardens
During the site visit to Kelmarna Gardens, it was such a great experience learning about how urban agriculture works. As someone who doesn’t really know a lot about gardening, it was an eye-opening experience. Our guest speaker talked about how Kelmarna gardens help improve multiple aspects of the community from environmental to social.
This garden doesn’t just help improve the environment through composting and only using organic materials to grow the plants, it also helps create a close-knit community through events, education programs, therapeutic garden and just by having volunteers around.
It was interesting to find out that this garden was originally used for people with mental illness, the garden was used as a therapeutic garden which helped those individuals with mental illness. And now it’s used by the community around it. It was also nice to find out that the gardens are used by younger people too. Some schools around the area use the garden for educational purposes and I believe that teaching and learning about current issues can definitely make more people aware about it.
When we visited, we were also asked to help out in collecting feijoas to help clear the chicken area which was a lot of fun - it reminded me of home land and how I used to work closely with animals. It was amazing to see such a variety plants and even animals; from worms, to cats, chickens, pony and cows.
It was an amazing experience overall. What I liked about it was that the community drove it and not only does it create relationships and connections between plants, animals and people but also creating relationships between individuals as well.
