Sitting in a circle and accompanied by lettuce, eggplants, beans and tomatoes, among other products. This is how the elderly users of the Cas Serres day center were waiting at 10:30am yesterday morning for the start of the facility’s practical vegetable garden workshop.
The island director of Social Welfare, Santiago Marí, the president of the Association of Organic Agriculture Producers of Ibiza and Formentera (Apaeef), Maribel Juan, and the treasurer of this association, Marina Cardona, participated in the briefing to present the project ‘Horts per compartir’, in which seniors could also participate. Maribel and Marina asked questions to the elderly, with memory disorders, to help them remember: “What tomatoes did you have in your garden?”, “Who can explain how to make a salad?” or “What were watermelons like before?”.
This is an initiative that “helps the elderly to get back to their roots and to work on memory, sensations, smell and flavors”, said Marí happily.
Two of the users of the day center work in the garden. | VICENT MARÍ
Theraputic tool for the elderly
‘Horts per compartir’ is presented as an “installation project for agroecological advice providing the necessary materials to create small gardens as a therapeutic tool for users and residents of different social and health centers and day centers of Ibiza, with the collaboration of its technical staff,” reported from the Consell Insular in a statement.
“It is a great activity because they are entertained, they learn things and then they get to eat what they produce here”, said the island director, minutes before going out to the terrace to help users to plant lettuce and beans in the planters and also on tables adapted for people with reduced mobility.
At the time, the elderly were delighted: “You have to get your hands dirty”, “It’s not the first lettuce I’ve sown” or “I was born in the garden”, they commented among themselves laughing. One of the users of the center, Pepa, 82 years old and born in Malaga, pointed to where they were working: “Look how well it has turned out”. “All the neighbors came to my garden to get the produce because there was nothing in theirs”, Pepa recalled.
Santiago Marí helps a user to sow beans. | VICENT MARÍ
With this initiative, the elderly can “interact with the local varieties” of vegetables and even “learn how they were sown”. “Let them teach us”, said Maribel Juan. “In the center have been working for years with the gardens, we have always planted and have always had a great response”, stressed the psychologist and coordinator of the day center of Cas Serres, independent of the Public Hospital Residence Assisted Living, Margarita Ferrer. “After covid, it was also implemented in the other space in the residence”, she added.
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