Summer Family Gardening

Over summer, we’ve delivered 3 family gardening sessions for families with children ages 0-18 years. These sessions aimed to encourage outdoor play and activity, inspire healthy cooking and eating, and provide the skills to grow fruits and vegetables from home.

At the sessions, children and their families had opportunities to explore the allotment through a range of activities, including bug hunts, colour/texture hunts, nature play, and bird spotting. The children and their families have also learnt gardening skills by taking part in planting, harvesting and plant care activities.

At the sessions, our lead Root ’n’ Fruit volunteer Bob gave cooking demonstrations to showcase how easy and cost effective it can be to cook healthy recipes from produce that can be mostly grown at home. Alongside these demonstrations, we provided food recipe bags to families in attendance, enabling families to recreate these recipes from home.

At the last Family Gardening session of the summer, we enjoyed a Veggie BBQ, where everything was not only meat free, but was mostly preservative free and harvested from the allotment. We had marrow burgers, courgette dogs, corn on the cob, aubergine burgers, roasted peppers, and salad. We also made fruit skewers, which were a fun addition that the children enjoyed helping to make.