The Grow Food Project

The Grow Food Project at Grow Food Grow Dunoon

A short film describing what happens at the project.

Dunoon Community Development Trust (DCDT) is pleased to announce that it will be leading a new shared food growing and therapeutic garden project at Struan Lodge Residential Care and Day Care Centre.
Following months of positive discussion with Argyll & Bute Council and Health & Social Care Partnership, DCDT has now signed a licence with Argyll & Bute Council to allow it to develop a new Grow Food Grow Dunoon food growing site in the grounds of Struan Lodge at Bencorrum Brae.
DCDT’s Grow Food Grow Dunoon initiative brought together a group of volunteers with varied skills who wanted to grow food as a team, rather than individually in gardens or on private allotments. Working in partnership with Kirn Primary School, Grow Food Grow Dunoon established a thriving growing space within the school grounds. Due to understandable limitations in access to the school-based site during term-time, the Grow Food Grow Dunoon team has been actively looking for a new growing site that can allow more volunteers to become involved in the project throughout the week and across the year. The grounds of Struan Lodge will now provide the perfect location.

Home grown food fruit and vegetables are nutritious and tasty – yet growing them is hard work and takes knowledge and experience. We are a group of people who came together because we wanted to grow our own food, not in a private allotment or garden, but as a team. This way we can support each other because we each have different skills. As well, we can enjoy our time together rather than slogging away on our own.

Courses and
Workshops

We teach people how to grow food in a variety of ways.

We run courses in seed propagation, planting, composting, harvesting. We are also planning courses on natural bee-keeping, food preserving, tree planting and more. More details here

Dunoon Community Radio

We have had a radio show every Friday and Tuesday at 12.00 noon on Dunoon Community Radio. Each week Martin spoke with a different guest about a specific issue connected with growing food, local community concerns and the natural world around us. Plus there was music from every decade in between the deep and meaningful, as well as not so deep and meaningful, conversation. You can listen to some of the shows here. He is taking a break from the show while developing the new food growing project at Struan Lodge.

Logo created by one of the pupils at Kirn Primary School.

Teaching

We have been teaching pupils at Kirn Primary School how to grow plants from seed and care for them as they grow.
Here is a slideshow of the the first year:

The first year.

Dunoon Community Development Trust

The Grow Food, Grow Dunoon project comes under the Dunoon Area Alliance which manages the Community Development Trust. More details here

Supporting other projects

We are interested in facilitating other community food growing projects establish themselves. We have shown through this system there is a simple yet very productive way of growing quantity and quality vegetables.
Please contact us to find out more