Just returning to normal again after a hectic half term, visiting friends and family, hosting sleepovers, various sporting camps and Halloween. A theme that has kept coming back to me throughout this period, and also during our first year of Cultivating Change is that of sharing, and the happiness and sense of community sharing provides.
This half term in our own local community in Cambridge, we shared some of the large pumpkins grown in the greenhouses by Cultivating Change’s seed provider/our supporter/my husband's company CN Seeds. We posted a notice in our local residents group letting them know they were welcome to come and collect a pumpkin from our house to use to celebrate Halloween. We didn’t expect to get so many takers or make such an impact and bring our community closer together.
People came by to collect the pumpkins and introduce themselves and what we loved was that the pumpkins provided an opportunity to find common ground and get to know them, to chat about their gardens and we even received an invitation to look round one of them.
Our whatsapp group came to life with pictures of the carved pumpkins, messages of thanks and chat that quickly created a deeper sense of community. The actual Halloween evening was buzzing in our local streets, with many different carved pumpkins and residents out trick-or-treating and chatting to each other, which was lovely after a tough year of restrictions. We have agreed to do this annually and it made me really appreciate the value of sharing, as a way to cement communities.
One of our key values and beliefs at Cultivating Change is that the power of gardening and growing not only gives huge personal benefit, but it also has the potential to strengthen communities too.
At the heart of our values and beliefs at Cultivating Change is the power of gardening and growing your own in strengthening communities.
We have seen some amazing examples of sharing from many of our #cultivatorsforchange over the last year; such as Gill Harvey-Bush and her amazing tomato plant sharing and donating homegrown produce to her local food bank, The Humanroots Community Garden vegetable boxes donated to locals in need, a big seed swap at Edible Guernsey and the sharing of seeds to the local community at Incredible Edible, Handbridge. These are just a few examples, we know there have been many more...
We feel so grateful to see these communities connect and extend the positive impacts they have felt on their well being and share it with others.
We loved sharing the Pumpkins with our local community this year and we would love to see more examples of this type of community sharing and we would love you to let us know any ways seeds and home grown produce has been shared in your community.