Joy and dignity among the crops as P.E.I. patients help tend garden beds

When Nancymarie Arsenault started working at Hospice P.E.I. as executive director five years ago, she heard about a client struggling with food insecurity.

That led her to apply for funding to create four raised garden beds at the Provincial Palliative Care Centre, where Hospice P.E.I.'s offices used to be. 

"I had a few comments like 'You're going to grow food for people who are dying?' and I was like, 'Yes, they still eat,'" she said.

She called the project Gardens of Life. Now, it has expanded to 19 boxes at the palliative care centre near Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown, plus five long-term care homes where hospice volunteers help out.

Over the years, the project has become about much more than simply providing food, Arsenault said.

"In the long-term care homes, residents would help me plant them when I brought the seedlings in," she said.

"Not everybody gets to see the fruition because they may die before that happens. But life goes on. And we always say, 'Our work isn't about dying, it's about living.' And those Gardens of Life help create that message."

Arsenault plants the boxes herself, then staff at the facilities help keep an eye on them, watering and weeding the plants.

She grows small vegetables and edible flowers, but she mixes up the varieties every year. The first summer, there were heirloom tomatoes and peppers, for example. 

The food is available for anyone who might want or need it, Arsenault said. 

One year, she grew beets and left them in the community kitchen at the Provincial Palliative Care Centre. "Then somebody came back with a jar of pickled beets they had made with the beets that we had left there."

As well as providing food, the project has allowed joy to bloom in places many think of as lacking that quality.

Arsenault remembers a few years ago, when Hospice P.E.I. volunteers were supporting a patient who had not been in a great place mentally and physically.

One day, she saw from her office that a volunteer had been able to get the woman outside to enjoy the fresh air and check out the garden boxes.