UK: How lockdown gardening is helping Yorkshire through crisis

From health benefits to self-sufficiency, Yorkshire’s lockdown gardeners explain why they’ve taken to growing at home to get them through this difficult period

By Sarah Wilson
Yorkshire Post
11th May 2020

Excerpt:

For Sally Fairbrass, it’s this element of gardening that’s become especially important under lockdown. Currently working as an ICU nurse in Yorkshire, the 26 year-old demonstrates why the rise in lockdown gardening is about more than just free time:

“I do find my garden a great stress relief…being outside and doing something with that future planning gives me a sense of purpose”.

Hannah echoes this sentiment, saying that she’s found gardening to be “a great way to take your mind off everything that’s going on”.

Planting and growing, it seems, is offering people a way of exerting a degree of control over a future that is mostly uncertain; “future planning” that doesn’t just focus on the negatives.

In some cases, lockdown has added an urgency to long standing plans to start gardening. It wasn’t just the supermarkets which saw a run on products in the early stages of lockdown, but online seed and plant stores too.

Rob Coates of Holmfirth, who recently started his own lockdown veg patch, is among those who ordered in a few weeks back. Though he says he’s “always liked the idea of being able to enjoy eating something that I’ve grown”, it was lockdown that pushed him to finally buy veg seedlings.

Read the complete article here.