Green Fingers All Round at Noddfa Hostel

Published by Paul Diggory for North Wales Housing Association in Housing

Staff and service users at Noddfa homeless hostel inColwynBayhave transformed their rear garden, using the area to plant and grow vegetables and fruit.

With donations of materials, bulbs and equipment from B&Q in Llandudno, the former bare garden area is now a hive of activity with all service users joining in to plant, nurture and eventually eat the home-grown foods.

So far, lettuce, onions, tomatoes and chillies have offered rich pickings whilst replanting is currently underway to make way for the Winter harvest. Tenants have been so keen on the idea that they have now set up their own vegetable window boxes in the hope of growing more food for the hostel.

Deborah Lewis of Noddfa hostel said: “This has been such a fantastic initiative for us all here providing us with salad foods across the summer months and hopefully taking this through the seasons from hereon with potatoes and other root vegetables to come next. The service users are all involved and it’s great to see them working as a team, sharing ideas and tips and clearly enjoying developing this as an interest.

“The staff at B&Q in Llandudno have showed us tremendous support and have worked closely with one of our project support workers Geoff Baldwin to make this happen. As a charity, we rely on donations to be able to introduce initiatives such as this so without them the new garden wouldn’t be here.

She added: “We’re rapidly running out of garden area here at Noddfa as our beds grow but were not complaining at all and are all enjoying our fantastic home grown food!”