When Julie Lamplugh's parents grew too frail to manage their once "thriving" vegetable garden, she enjoyed giving them summer gifts from her own garden.
"One particular day I took some fresh runner beans, handed them to my mum and the look on her face, the excitement because she was going to have fresh runner beans with her lunch, it really hit me."
Photo: Public domain
Julie thought that if she could so easily share her own excess produce with someone no longer able to garden, lots of other people could too. Shortly after, an article about an elderly Christchurch man forced to skip lunch solidified her thinking.
"It really bothered me and it made me think 'Julie, you really need to do this thing you're thinking about. There's a real need out there and this is a way of addressing it."
Julie hopes her simple food-sharing concept The SEDE Project will soon be popping up in communities around the country.
"How I envisage it working is people living in the community - gardeners predominantly - who have excess produce in their gardens finding an elderly person in the community who can no longer garden or doesn't have easy access to fresh vegetables.
"It's a very very simple thing, it doesn't cost anybody anything, it saves food wastage, and it's really going to help with the physical and mental health of the elderly because it also builds connections within the community."
Julie is still figuring out how The SEDE Project can expand because soon she'll no longer be able to manage the Facebook group by herself.
She hopes the idea might be "self-initiated" by communities, with one person willing to play a coordination role.
Photo: Priscilla du Preez / Unsplash
