National Gardening Week
First launched in 2012, the Royal Horticultural Society’s National Gardening Week is an annual event. It aims to raise awareness for the importance of gardening as well as inspire more people to plant something of their own or even just to go outside and explore beautiful gardens and green spaces around. This year, National Gardening Week will take place between 29 April – 5 May and the theme is ‘Edible Britain’1.
Try growing your own…
The UK imports fresh produce from all over the world, but this comes with a cost. Think about how much fuel isused to ship produce from overseas and then to transport them from the distributers to supermarkets once in the UK, and the negative impact this has on the environment2. This is why we are often encouraged to buy local produce as much as we can because this helps to reduce both food miles and energy consumption3. If you wanted to take it a step further, you could take National Gardening Week as an opportunity to start growing your own produce and at the same time reduce your carbon footprint. You can start from something as small as a herb plant on the kitchen window sill and then slowly progress onto other crops outside. You might just discover that you’ve had green fingers all along!
How to get involved…
The Royal Horticultural Society has a few tips on how you can get involved and help ‘spread the seed’ this National Gardening Week…
- Share your plant cuttings with friends so they can grow them at their own homes
- Create your own recipe cards, activity sheets or fact sheets about gardening to give out to people
- Have a bake sale using home grown or local fruits and vegetables – you may wish to donate the proceeds to your charity of choice
- You could even clean up and transform unused land in your neighbourhood into a communal garden or allotment plot (if permitted by the local council of course)
Working out…
If you are a regular gym-goer, this is also the perfect opportunity for you to switch up your workout for the week. Gardening gets all your major muscles working so you will be building strength as well as burning calories. The NHS even list heavy gardening, such as digging or shovelling, as an example of muscle-strengthening activities4.. Not only will you be giving back to the community by gardening, but you might just discover a new found love for this hobby!
Further information
Check out The Royal Horticultural Society’s website to see events around you, or if you are organising something yourself, be sure to register your event here to spread the word and get more people involved.
Don’t forget to use #NationalGardeningWeek on social media to share with everyone what you are getting up to this National Gardening Week.
References
1https://www.rhs.org.uk/get-involved/national-gardening-week
2Sun et al. (2018) Importing food damages domestic environment: Evidence from global soybean trade. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115: 5415-5419
4 https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/physical-activity-guidelines-older-adults/