Project GreenPlot

By Elizabeth Collins

Connect the Plots is a South Gippsland community group formed in June 2019, and its 'Plotters' have, until the pandemic, been meeting monthly around a dining table to share a meal and discuss issues around climate change. Project GreenPlot is the group's first initiative, and was the obvious choice when shelves were stripped of seeds and seedlings during the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020. Food security is one of our most basic needs - and gives the common ground for real connection between people from all walks of life. We weave our social fabric a little tighter, and are better for it.

It's all about coordination, really. Knowing that people are more open to the invitation when the investment is easy, we set up a system whereby home gardeners put aside 1 square metre to grow food for community. We can supply seed and seedlings, but many Plotters elect to donate their excess produce when available on our Distribution Days.

If people find the whole idea of edible gardening a little daunting, we're ready to help get a beginner's household going with mentors on the ground in lots of places. From this support we hope more can start to enjoy meals with homegrown ingredients - and we know the culinary satisfaction and mental health that it can bring.

One square metre of soil may not seem like much. But when 300+ of us do it, that's a heap of vegies and saved seed that didn't have to travel hundreds, maybe thousands of kilometres. What is saved in terms of carbon emissions, pesticides and herbicides is significant and healthy soil has an amazing capacity to drawdown carbon.

Fresh produce from those 1sqm plots now comes to the local community house every fortnight to be distributed to those receiving food relief - not only giving people the opportunity to include more fresh ingredients in their meals but also for others to contribute to their community in a very simple way.

After six months, Project GreenPlot has 64 Plotters who have grown over $1500 worth of just-picked, homegrown food for boxes that are distributed to residents in the Corner Inlet area. The model is pretty simple to set up and we are happy for it be applied in other communities: what we'd like to see is an entire network of local food swapping, growing and sharing that provides food security by embedding itself into how we all live, less dependent on the supermarket and more on each other.