We are excited to launch this year’s summer garden programme at Justlife Manchester: GROW PROJECT, in partnership with Whitworth Art Gallery.Gardening is a central aspect to the activities programme at Justlife and a popular choice for service users. Perhaps this is because a recent study conducted by
Bakker Spalding has found that 88% of people find that mental wellbeing is a key benefit for spending time in the garden. Gardening is good for the soul and our service users feel the benefits!The project that we are linking up with is the
‘GROW PROJECT’ and we have been gifted the time of experienced horticulturist Liz Cole alongside some Whitworth Art Gallery Grow volunteers to make-over our garden, to growing herbs, flowers and fruit. The hope is that the fruit can be used for healthy smoothies for our service users and can also be harvested by passers-by in the local community as we are growing raspberry bushes against the fence!We had 10 people doing gardening this week along with Liz and there was a real buzz in spite of it being quite cold! This Friday some of the group have the incredible opportunity to spend the day helping to plant out the Whitworth Gallery garden alongside the garden designer Sarah Price.Since opening the Manchester Centre in 2011, Justlife service users, volunteers and staff have invested time in developing the garden and their hard work has been recognised with awards from the RHS, Manchester in Bloom and North West in Bloom.
