Garden & Greenhouse Project
Our Greenhouse Project provides opportunities for therapeutic horticulture experience, employment skills and development and social interaction.
Program Description
S.T.E.P. by S.T.E.P., Inc.'s Garden and Greenhouse program provides opportunities foe our members to enhance their vocational skills, obtain horticulture education, and enhance their social network.
Our primary goal of our project is to improve the physical mental, emotional, and spiritual health of our members and people of St. Lawrence County by providing access to cleaner, locally, grown, healthier foods. We want to improve the overall health of participants by having our hands in the dirt, receiving Vitamin D from the sun, inhaling soil microbes, increasing physical movement, increasing social connection, and being a part of something positive.
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How Does it Work?
The program is designed to teach our members how to grow, harvest, prepare, cook, and store their own food. Our vision is to incorporate a self-sufficient model where members, volunteers, students, and others from the community learn how to grow and prepare their own foods that people would otherwise not have access to.
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Our program encompasses a holistic effort - we want to regenerate our spirit - we want to recreate our spirit. Our project will encompass a community effort, aimed at community building, volunteerism, while addressing stigma and community integration challenges - providing opportunities for recovery from illness through alternative medicine and holistic approaches.
Soil Psychology
Along with the benefits of diet quality from access to and consumption of clean, fresh produce are the therapeutic benefits of gardening and horticulture. Researchers are discovering that growing your own food - however much or little you can do - is better for your health than anyone ever suspected. And the nutritional value of what you harvest is almost the least of it. Growing your own food proves to be nature's fruitful way of cultivating your health - physically and psychologically.
Benefits of Gardening
Getting out in the garden plants us back in what now appears to be our optimal habitat. Eating fruits and vegetables - even antioxidant-rich tomatoes, melons, beets, cabbage, and berries - turns out to be only half of a newly evolving story of health. Our bodies and brains depend on the whole experience of growing our own. Our mental and physical health seems to be deeply rooted in the dirt.
