This spring, the Coombs Farmers’ Institute will be helping people who want to become more self-reliant when it comes to putting food on the table.
The Coombs Farmers’ Institute will be starting its Here We Grow program, which is part of the province’s Grow Local program, later this spring.
The Grow Local program funds 10 communities throughout the province with $25,000 for each community.
The Here We Grow project will engage locals in workshops that will teach people how to grow food, food preparation and preservation techniques focusing on good nutrition with some workshops targeting school teachers to encourage ongoing teaching of food literacy.
Janet Thony, president of the Coombs Farmers’ Institute, said Here We Grow will be about teaching people how to be more self-reliant by growing their own food.
Thony said Here We Grow is a two-year pilot project aimed at helping the younger generation to help themselves.
“It wasn’t that many decades ago that every single person had a garden and a cow and pigs and chickens,” Thony said.
“It was considered normal,” said Thony. “It was abnormal if people didn’t.”
The Coombs Farmers’ Institute has partnered with the Parksville Museum, the Arrowsmith Agricultural Association and the Town of Qualicum Beach to create three education centres in each community to teach people how to grow their own food.
Thony said the schools will be at the Parksville Museum, the Coombs Fairgrounds and the Qualicum Commons. Thony said it will be four half-day indoor and outdoor class sessions in April at all three locations followed by a series of workshops.
The four classes being offered are Dollars and Sense of Growing Vegetables, Building Soil and Garden Beds, Selecting Seeds, and Easy Plant Nutrition and Prevent Pest Problems.
Thony said the idea of the classes being in April is that May is the prime spring planting month here if people are trying to grow annual vegetables, but she added that on the Island “we have year-round growing ability, not just in greenhouses.”
The Coombs Farmers’ Institute is 103 years old, Thony said. The institute is for farmers and non-farmers who are interested or concerned about the food they put on their tables.
Thony said the object of any farmers’ institute is to improve the conditions of rural life so that settlement may be permanent and prosperous, promote theory and practice of agriculture, promote home economics, public health, child welfare, education and better schools.
For more information, visit http://coombsfarmersinstitute.weebly.com/.
