Marymead’s horticultural enterprise helps young adults with disabilities

Azure Retirement Village – Community Shed Members

Sunflowers stretch towards the sky and tall corn stalks wave in the breeze within the thriving grounds of social enterprise mulch – Marymead’s Urban land Community Harvest.

The initiative, now in its tenth year, enables young adults with disability to develop skills and build community connections through work in horticulture.

At the entrance to mulch, a large barrow is slowly filling with juicy tomatoes, plump zucchini and brightly coloured raspberries in preparation for sale to the public through a farm gate-style market cart.

The barrow is brand new – made by the Azure Village community shed to help mulch participants with some of their heavy lifting.

“Carting all the fruit and vegetables up with an honesty box every day with wheelbarrows was a bit much,” team leader of skills development and community engagement Mick Pettifer explained.

“We knew there was a community shed up at Azure Village, and we put the call out to them. They just took charge and came up with this amazing barrow with recycled materials.”

Mick said the vegetable barrow had expanded the program’s opportunities.

“It has freed us up a lot,” he said.

“We can sell a lot more and it has helped us get regular customers. It is like a big, fancy market cart and we can fit more produce on it. It looks amazing.”

Participants are engaged in the seed-to-sale process in mulch‘s permaculture garden. Skill development goals are individually tailored to suit each participant’s interests, skills and abilities.

“Mulch is purposeful activity, where the guys are contributing to something bigger than themselves,” Mick said.

“It is their work. For some people that might be carrying a bucket of weeds from one end of the garden to the other, and that is a big win. For others, it might be learning the full process from seed to sale. They take ownership of it.”

Azure Community Shed committee chairman Bob Searle said making the barrow had been a wonderful experience for the team.

“We have done everything from putting legs back on tables to insulating garages and building the frames for the Marymead plant auxiliary,” he said.

“The objective is the wellbeing of people. The advantage of the barrow is that it brought people together to work as a team and gave them a sense of camaraderie.”

Bob said Narrabundah local, Staffy, had donated a wheelchair to the barrow, making the job much easier.

“It was really generous and made things go quite smoothly,” he said.

“We were all really pleased to assist in a project that is doing such fantastic work. It’s that feeling that you are doing something worthwhile for a greater cause.”

• The mulch team is currently raising funds for a new polyhouse tunnel, to produce better crops while also using less water. You can donate to the cause here.