SPRING has officially sprung, and we’ve an hour more to play with in the evenings so what better time to step into the great outdoors and start volunteering.Here in Tralee we’re lucky to have one of the most progressive public community gardening projects in the country and it’s open for business- so to speak. Saturday March 26th marked the start of public participation in Tralee Community Garden for 2016.
“We’re always chomping at the bit from January if there’s fine weather, but we’ve learned to be patient as well and we don’t have any indoor facilities and the ground in this area isn’t suitable for early planting,” Gretta O’Rourke, Project Liaison Officer with the Tralee Community Garden Project explained.
Public activity days run in the project from now until the end of September twice a week, weather permitting.
The Community Garden, a public access integration project, started 16 years ago in Ballyrickard. The Garden is not just about developing green fingers, it also encourages people to think about self sufficiency and quality of life, not just for themselves but their wider communities in an open and inclusive way.
From it’s humble beginnings as an 8x6ft square garden in the heart of a housing estate the garden has grown and developed, relocating to the heart of Tralee Town Park in recent years.
“The first garden was a test of what it would be like to put an integrated project into a public space with no security, with no barriers to people or no conditions on who could use the space,” Gretta explained.
“It was a huge success- small little kids were very enthused by it, but equally so were their parents and grandparents. A lot of people didn’t grow vegetables any more they didn’t have vegetable plots, they were interested in it,” she added.
For some youngsters it was a first taste of the reality of food production, an insight into where the food they bought in their local supermarket actually came from.
Relocating to the Town Park was a big move, in every sense, for everyone involved in the project- and it was no mean feat to transform a derelict site into a Garden of Eden in just three days with the help of equipment and laboured that the group managed to beg, borrow and steal.
“We had a great reaction from the front line staff in the Town Council at that stage who all instantly knew what the idea of the project was, they could instantly see the validity of it and being able to achieve it with very little financial input,” Gretta recalled.
“A Community Garden was something we thought we could develop there without interrupting the flow of the park, without putting extra pressure on public spaces and also put in a project that really didn’t affect people who weren’t interested,” she added.
The public Community Garden created in the Town park is open to everybody whether they be national, international, local, transient people, of any age, they can help with as much or as little as they like and volunteers don’t have to have a degree in gardening to get involved.
“The main thing if activities are happening in the garden, is that everybody does everything together so that nobody eventually gets to say well that’s my patch of ground or I know more than you do. It doesn’t matter how much you know, it matters about encompassing everybody,” Gretta suggested.
“Someone might come in to look at the butterflies, but they are using the garden. Someone might come in just to sit on a bench, that’s using the garden- someone’s walking past and just likes to see the colours or likes to see the people working in it… You try all the time to make sure that everything done in the project is fully inclusive of everybody else,” she added.
Work in the garden is shared between volunteers, initially people are encouraged to concentrate on projects they can succeed with quickly- with ideas like tower building that they can bring home with them.
If the work is shared then so too is the harvest, which generally includes 25 varieties of fruit, 30 of herbs and 35 of vegetables each season.
“Share in the Harvest is one of the principles of the garden, that all our visitors and volunteers would go away with something to share with somebody else,” Gretta stressed.
“Over the last 20 years people are not as used to building up a community up, something like sharing extra produce, extra herbs is a great way of striking up a conversation; You have something to give somebody else that hasn’t cost you a huge amount of money,” she added.
There are plenty of community events within the Tralee Community Garden too, most notably the BBQs that are normally held around Feile na mBlath in June and later in August/ September to coincide with harvest time. Between 400 and 600 people normally come along to join in the fun.
In addition there are children’s cookouts, treasure hunts, festivals and a variety of courses on aspects of gardening from culinary plant use to water conservation and mindfulness.
It all combines to make the Community Garden a vibrant volunteering option: “We are very lucky that we have the Kerry Volunteer Centre. When we set up the project we asked ourselves how we would reach people who want to be involved- so we immediately made links with the volunteer centre, we work very closely with them to tailor ideas that will suit different types of volunteers.”
The central location of the garden also makes it one of the more visible volunteering opportunities in Tralee.
“We nurture the whole concept of volunteering, there is no expectation of how long you’d stay. You can volunteer in the garden for five minutes or five years, that’s the practicality of it. All the tools and equipment you will need are provided, all that you are asking the public is to wear sensible footwear,” Gretta explained.
“We understand the value of volunteering and the value of volunteer recognition- every year we would have Volunteer Thank You Days, Volunteer Participation Certs, we’d offer professional references which can be of use in things like Asylum Seekers, Refugees or people’s work programme. We also log Gaise Awards,” she added.
The Volunteer Committee also work with a host of different partner groups including: An Taisce, Kerry County Council, the KDYS, mental health organisations, juvenile liaison officers, St Vincent de Paul, Positive Aging and a number of local schools and businesses.
What might come as a surprise to many people who stroll past the Tralee Community Garden on a regular basis is the amount of scientific research carried out there. The project maintains links with the Institute of Technology Tralee and a number of other national and international universities.
Research carried out in the garden look at everything from the best ways to conserve water to music studies, with Cambridge University recently visiting the garden to record the plants.
“We’ve had people from Utah come to do emotional studies of plants. It really is very different from the perception of just going along and digging a few acres of land,” Gretta remarked.
“We currently have a study ongoing on the Snail population in the garden and whether we can eat them. If we can eat them we’ll serve them at the community BBQ,” she added.
If getting involved in your local community, developing your skills, sharing in the harvest or even a taste of snails is something you might be interested in then log on to: https://www.volunteerkerry.ie/index.php/volunteers/opportunities.
