Plant Grow Share: Don’t let it go to waste
Plant Grow Share delivers donated produce by bike to food banks and community groups, tackling food insecurity and reducing waste across Glasgow's Southside. Now they are reaping the rewards of their efforts and tenacity.
Sketch of an allotment in Govanhill
By James McAleer | Illustration by giacinta frisillo
It is an event, each weekend in the long days of summer, to see two trailers and a cargo bike wending through Pollok Park, brimming with vegetables. It is something to be smiled at by strollers and dogwalkers. Occasionally they grimace; when empty, coasting downhill, the trailers rattle murderously. Clean transport is a crucial part of the Plant Grow Share project, a clean and efficient way to ferry donated fruit and vegetables from growing site to drop off point, so the rattling is here to stay.
Plant Grow Share is a food redistribution service which takes donated produce from allotment and back garden growers then delivers it to community groups and food banks who really need it. The aim is to fight both food insecurity in communities whilst mitigating climate change by delivering produce that would otherwise go to waste. When food waste is carelessly dumped in landfills, it breaks down and often releases harmful gases like methane into the atmosphere.
Their redistribution service is Plant Grow Share’s clever two-birds-one-stone solution to the most pressing problems in our society today. Alongside this redistribution service, Plant Grow Share workers manage raised beds in community spaces across the Southside and work with participants to enable them to grow produce from raised beds in their own back gardens.
Read more: Demands & Dreams for the Future—fixing our broken food system
In their first year, Plant Grow Share connected established growers with food banks and food points , gave 13 raised beds away to growers with limited access to growing resources, and built 9 public raised beds in the Southside. This three-pronged approach to tackling food insecurity was not without its challenges -– some growing sites, for example, were more responsive than others, and some raised bed space hard-won in the face of sceptical neighbours. But at the close of their second growing season (funded, for the second year in a row, through the National Lottery) Plant Grow Share are reaping the rewards of tenacity and hard work.
One of the main growing sites is nestled within the walled gardens of the Southside’s country park. Donations from Pollok House Kitchen Garden shift throughout the growing season, from the staple potato to cucamelons, miniature marvels with the skin of one and the taste of the other. Each weekend this tender cargo is transported from allotments to drop-off points in the Southside, with Pollockshaws Food Point and Al-Khair frequent beneficiaries. As reported in these pages, donations to food banks and food points have plummeted by some fifty per cent since the pandemic, while the number of people seeking support has only increased.
As well as providing an immediate response to food insecurity, Plant Grow Share also supports participants to build resilience and develop as growers independently, in their own right. With perennially rising food prices and a more general climate of estrangement from food production – particularly in cities – providing the tools and training for local people to grow their own, year on year, is a quietly significant achievement.
The growing season is over. The bikes and their trailers hibernate. Winter brings rest, reflection, and planning for the next year. On the winter solstice, Plant Grow Share worker Clara sowed garlic in a raised bed; a gardener tradition, for harvest on the longest day. Now, with Imbolc, the Gaelic festival of returning light, now just days away, the days growing out, snowdrops in the woods, it won’t be long before the bikes emerge, to go again.
Get involved with Plant Grow Share by contacting them through their website: www.plantgrowshare.co.uk