Hey guys, welcome to episode 196 of the Ocede stories.

Podcasts. episode 196 of the OCD stories

dot com podcast. Now this episode is a bit different

it's not specifically OCD focused but I wanted to do a few more

episodes on other things people can do if they feel like it as part of their recovery

So one initiative I came across is mental health gardening and one specific project in West London in the UK is called

Mind Food. Now Mind Food run courses for to help people improve mental well-being.

So as their website says, nature-based courses for anxiety and depression.

So they do do these kind of six week growing well-being courses where they take people with different mental health conditions and they help them through gardening and community and kind of connection with nature and

they bring in various things like mindfulness into that. So I was fascinated by

this model and they also run so anyone can come along on the weekend and take part and I went along

to do some gardening which I thoroughly enjoyed kind of getting my hands steady

you know learning how to grow things, which is something I've

never been great at, so that was great to kind of build that skill, to just chat with others

where there's no pressure and just have that community and then after I have

some tea and some food that had been grown in the garden like a watermelon and we had mint

tea so that was really cool to kind of have that connection to nature and the

earth. So yeah so I want to do an episode just to explore this. One if there's any

mental health gardening initiatives near you I know there's a few in the UK and maybe there's

others in the states, Canada, Sweden, wherever you're listening to this. If there's not, maybe it's something

you could be inspired to maybe start one up who knows if you really

enjoy that sort of thing or just as an episode to just maybe spend more time in nature if they want to

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