Growing Food For Beginners, 12 Week ‘How Food Grows’ Course With Coaching From Mick Kelly Starting 2nd May

How Food Grows - GROW 12 Veg in 12 Weeks
How to grow delicious, nutritious homegrown food for you and your family even if you are a complete beginner with no time, space, skills or green fingers. #TogetherWeGrow

Who is running the course?
I’m Mick Kelly, the founder of GIY. GIY is a social enterprise that supports around a million people each year to grow some of their own food for the first time. I have been growing food for 20 years, starting as a complete beginner in my early 30s and have since written five books about food growing and developing a more sustainable food system.  I presented both Food Matters on RTE & 3 series of a TV show Grow, Cook, Eat on RTE and Amazon Prime that has been seen by over 12 million people around the world. I spend my whole life trying to inspire and support people to grow food successfully – and when I am not doing that, I am growing my own food at home.

What you get in the course

• How Food Grows GROWBox – you will receive a GROWBox with the seeds for the 12 veg, compost, biodegradable planting pots, seaweed feed and lots more that you need to get started on the course.
• 12 Veg in 12 Weeks Content: The weekly course content was filmed in my garden at home in Dunmore East, starts with sowing the seeds and progresses each week of the 12 weeks until we harvest together. The weekly content is short – around 20 minutes on average.  I recommend you watch it at the start of each week and then do the tasks in the week ahead.  I will send you a simple list of instructions and additional learning content each week.
• Bi-Weekly Virtual Group Coaching Calls: Each couple of weeks of online training is followed by a group coaching call with me where we share work to date and learnings and give feedback to ensure people make quick progress. (1 hour per session)
• Closed Virtual Group – just for our group where we can share pictures of our successes (and challenges..!) ,get questions answered and share the journey
• Bonus Benefits
• A free copy of our Gourmand Award-winning book GROW, COOK, EAT

About this course:
I have grown my own food for 2 decades now, but I remember what it’s like to be a complete beginner.  The confusion! The fear or failure!  Not having a clue what I was doing!  That’s why I have created this 12 week real-time programme to take you on a step-by-step journey that will build your confidence, get you growing food and if we play our cards right could deliver up to 50kg of veg a year, saving you up to €500 a year from even the smallest of growing spaces.  Imagine yourself tucking in to nutritious beetroot, crunchy radishes, sweet garden peas and delicious oriental salad leaves.  There is simply no better feeling than being. a GIYer and putting homegrown food on the table. 

Why 12 weeks? 
Well, that’s how long it takes to get some of the easiest and quickest veg to grow and we have selected the 12 veg for that very reason.  The veg are basil, Beetroot, Chard, French Beans, Kale, Lettuce, Garden Peas, Carrots, Radish, Spinach, Oriental Greens, and Wild Rocket.  Each week, in real time we will show you exactly how to sow, grow and harvest these 12 veg so that by the end of the 12 weeks we will be harvesting veg together.  The course is a mix of:

• Kit - the right kit you need (a special How Food Grows GROWBox with seeds, compost, pots etc) to start growing right out of the box, with no daunting trips to the garden centre.
  
• Content - Online learning videos to watch each week and live bi-weekly virtual Q&A coaching sessions with me on Thursday evenings starting 2nd May
• Community – a small community of beginner growers to learn from and share the journey with

Who is this for:
The course is for complete beginners, who want to become a GIYer but don’t know where to start, or those that have tried (and failed) before.  It’s aimed at people who know instinctively that homegrown food is more nutritious and sustainable, want to save money on their grocery bills, or want to show their kids where their food comes from.  It doesn’t matter whether you have a small or big garden, or no garden at all.  All of the veg we will be growing can be grown in containers.  

 Why I created this course:
I created this course because from teaching at GROW HQ and talking to GIYers all over the world, I know just how confused people can be at the beginning.  They love the idea of it, may have already tried it before, but find it overwhelming.  They’ve stood in garden centres looking at aisle after aisle of strange looking gardening equipment and rows of seeds with strange latin names and wonder whether it’s for them.  Above all, they really don’t want to look silly if they don’t get it right.

In reality food growing is quite straight forward.  Though there is lots to learn, there are some basics I can teach you that will take the mystery out of it and vastly increase your chances of success.  These are skills that you really only have to be shown how to do once and you will remember them forever. 

The typical barriers we hear from people about why they don’t grow food even thought they want to are:

• Lack of Time – we are all so busy and have so many demands on our time, juggling life and work. But we can make food growing fit around our lives with some simple time saving tricks and techniques.
• Lack of Space – you might not have a big garden or maybe whatever space you have is full of trampolines and the like. But we can make food growing work in whatever space you have.  In just 3 small raised beds you can grow up to 50kg of food worth around €500.  And all 12 veg we are growing, can also be grown in containers so even if you just have a balcony or tiny garden you can still take part.
• Lack of Skills – growing your own food is a proper lifeskill and it takes time to develop them. But there are some core skills around seed sowing, transplanting, managing pests and so on that you will learn on this course that are the key skills you need to grow successfully.  When I started growing I was convinced I didn’t have so-called greenfingers (which I am now convinced is a myth – anyone can learn to grow) and would never be able to grow food – but even in my first year when I knew almost nothing I was still able to produce lots of food to eat.

Course Milestones:
Week 1: Seeds
Week 2: Soil
Week 3: Containers
Week 4: Raised Bed
Week 5: Transplanting
Week 6: Routine Jobs (thinning, weeding, supporting)
Week 7: Slugs
Week 8: Succession Sowing
Week 9: Competitors (Pests, Birds, Cats and more!)
Week 10: Water
Week 11: Feeding our Plants
Week 12: Harvest

Price:
The course is €395 including all the items mentioned above (and including postage).  That works out at less than €33 a week.

Dates
The first 12 week course will begin on 2nd May 2023

Bi Weekly Coaching 7pm-8pm Online on Thursdays

2^nd May

16^th May

30^th May

13^th June

27^th June

11^th July

#TogetherWeGrow