Growing market gardens on other people’s properties | Urban farming | Gardening Australia

Farm it Forward transforms unused spaces into productive market gardens. Subscribe to channel: http://ab.co/GardeningYouTube
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Gardeners all know people with energy to grow food but have no garden – while elsewhere, there are those with more land than they can manage. Costa visits a group in the Blue Mountains that is bringing together landowners and young gardeners so they can work together.

The social enterprise employs young people to farm on unused land. The project, called Farm it Forward, was set up by Manu Prigioni, whose garden has featured on Gardening Australia before. The landowners receive a weekly box of vegetables as ‘rent’, with the rest of the food sold through a local co-operative.

“We aim to reconnect people,” Manu says.

One of the landowners is retired nurse, Sylvia May, who has lived on the block for 40 years. She cleared an overgrown tennis court on the land with the hope of one day growing vegies, and now the group has made that a reality.

Jack Galluzzi manages the plot loves the process of learning and then passing on that knowledge to volunteers.

Landowner Alex Coleman found she was too busy with work to keep her garden going. “The Farm it Forward team came in with a group of volunteers and in one day the place was transformed,” she says. “The garden was getting me down a lot and now it’s a good place.”

Volunteer Kelly Thompson has helped transform Alex’s garden and now feels better connected to where the food on her plate came from.

Manu says: “We have recently reached 190kg of produce grown for our community this season, which was a very tricky season of bushfire, drought and tough times, so imagine what we could grow in a good season!

“What I hope is really to fine-tune this model so it can be used as a blueprint for other semi-rural areas all over Australia.”

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