Togher project founder Mandie Rekaby now has 90 people gardening

Mandie first became involved as she needed an outlet for herself while busy as a carer to her parents:

“Just after Covid I had given up my job as a chef to look after my parents. I was kind of hanging around the house for most of the day, after my parents had their breakfast I’d be waiting for the lunch and then the dinner,” she said.
One of Mandie’s friends worked as a social prescriber and she put her in touch with Maria Young, Green Spaces for Health co-ordinator.

“I’m big into gardening and Maria said I’d fall right in, that I could tip away during the days.”

And so she did.

“It was me time, when I was looking after sick people all day, it was something I could get away and do for myself.”

She was also pleased to get involved with in a project that could help restore the social fabric of her area, right after the pandemic.

“Covid took chunks out of people. The community garden gave people a chance to meet each other, which had been gone for years. I was all about getting the community back up and running again.”

Since 2022, the Togher Community Garden has given her and many other people a huge, ongoing boost.

“It’s a pity you can’t bottle it and sell it, it’s unreal. It’s so good for people. We have this guy from Chile, he’s in his thirties. When he arrived last summer he had a really bad stammer, he was so anxious. He was moving out of his rented house, had tools and he wanted to know if we wanted them. Now, a year later he’s a different man altogether. He’s confident, he looks forward to coming down every Saturday and doing work. We’d always have work for him to do.

“A lot of people have mental health issues, and they want to get back into the world. We have teenagers coming with special needs. I kind of take them under my wing. I’d say we have nearly 90 people coming, from every walk of life,” she said.

The Community Garden is also helping to integrate people in an area that has had its challenges.

“Last Saturday, we had 11 nationalities around one table (each day concludes with a light lunch). It’s absolutely amazing what it has done for the community. A lot of new houses have been built in our area, there are people from different nationalities who would never have mixed or known their neighbours.”

She feels she could have fallen into a depression if she didn’t have the Community Garden, having suffered a number of tragedies.

“My mother, my brother and my sister all died in the space of four months. I threw myself into the Garden, helping everyone else helped me in turn. My Dad passed away a few weeks ago too. If I didn’t have it, I probably wouldn’t have gotten out of the bed. It was perfect for me, I could put my energy into helping everyone. I love it, I’d be there seven days a week because it’s right on my doorstep,” she said.

Maria Young says community gardens are really flourishing on Leeside now. “There’s hardly a parish in the city without one now. It has been terrific, very positive for all the communities.”

Maria feels knowledge learned in the gardens is spreading out around the city. “Many of the houses built in Cork in the ‘50s and ‘60s would have had fairly nice sized gardens for people to grow food, that was the expectation and people are starting to do that. It is really rippling out. A number of primary schools came to us and they now have their own gardens,” she said.

Follow Togher Community Garden on Facebook: @Toghercommunitygarden