Grow and donate your homegrown produce to Bendigo Foodshare so that everyone in the Central Victorian community can have access to healthy food.
What is Grow a Row or Pick a Branch?
Grow a Row or Pick a Branch is a grassroots community project that encourages local people from across Central Victoria to plant extra crops in their gardens or harvest their excess fruit and vegetables with the intention of donating it to Bendigo Foodshare to redistribute as food.
As we all know, it’s important to eat a wide range of foods with sufficient high-quality proteins, carbohydrates, heart-healthy fats, vitamins, minerals and water to maintain a healthy body and lifestyle.
The diminishing ability of low-income families to pay for healthy food is consigning the least well-off in our community to a greater risk of diet-related illness, such as obesity and diabetes, as well as widening health inequalities.
By actively increasing our supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables, we hope to boost the amount of healthy food available relief for people who’ve fallen on tough times.
How do I take part?
Taking part in Grow a Row or Pick a Branch is easy.
- Simply, plant and grow an extra row of your favourite veggies, fruit or herbs in your school, backyard or community garden this season.
- When your crop is ready, donate part of the harvest to Bendigo Foodshare.
If you do not have room for an extra row, you can still participate by donating any fruit or vegetables you’ve grown but can’t use yourself.
Grow a Row or Pick a Branch is meant to be fun, so why not encourage or coordinate your local street, friends, family, school, workplace or community to Grow a Row or Pick a Branch too. Getting involved with one of our annual events could be the best way to do this. Look out for them on our social media or email in and let us know you want to participate. These are Grow a Row – Potato and Grow a Row – Garlic.
Grow a Row – Potato
This will begin around August each year, we usually get a few local stores to donate seed potato and we get as many people involved as possible. The aim here is to get people growing a staple food item, get them moving with some gentle exercise when planting, maintaining and harvesting and of course increase the fresh, local donations coming in to us.
Grow a Row – Garlic
This begins in about April, we encourage everyone to plant a bulb of garlic and give a few back to us while also keeping some for themselves.
Unfortunately it hasn’t been a great year for growing garlic and our crop suffered from a mould issue, which seemed to be widespread amongst other growers too.
It’s meant our yield didn’t produce nearly enough garlic to hold our Garlic Drive this year. Fingers crossed our Garlic Drive will be back again next year.
This program is proudly sponsored by
