Pumpkin carving.
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A successful Harvest Festival and the unveiling of the Friends of the Tenth war memorial.
October 31, 2019
This month has been a celebration of the Harvest. We decorated the greenhouse and surrounding areas with autumn wreaths, threaded chillies, pumpkins, and scarecrows made by patients during therapy sessions. The Harvest Festival was well attended it was good to see the greenhouse full of people. Our garden volunteers were on hand to serve refreshments and the farm shop saw the last of our squashes and pumpkins sold with some apples, chillies and homemade fruit sauce and crab apple jelly.
Pumpkin Carving
Bob Stafford from Shire Workshops, came to run a pumpkin carving workshop on the morning of the harvest festival. This was a real opportunity for creative expression and the end results were amazing. We had a mixture of patients from different departments, so the same activity was a chance to work on wide variety of problems: fine motor skills, hand-eye co-ordination, upper limb strength, concentration, following instruction, decision making, and standing tolerance. Having fun and an opportunity to try something different though was the main aim.
Neuro Group
Café Neuro ran earlier this week using the carved pumpkins and scarecrow as the backdrop, so our previous efforts proved useful.
The small neuro group continues to run weekly. We diverted from horticulture to cookery one week to do some baking in preparation for the harvest festival. We have since focused on saving seed from the chillies and threading the chillies to dry out. This has required focus, concentration, patience and good hand-eye co-ordination and again are useful activities to break into stages to test recall of instructions and information processing.
The same activity was adapted for Force Generation patients to include discussion about propagation and maintenance of Chilli plants for those wanting to develop knowledge and interest in growing plants at home.
Friends of the 10th War Memorial
I had the opportunity to visit the memorial to the 10th Battalion, the parachute regiment in Somerby with my colleague Andy Wright, Therapeutic Gardens Manager.
We have been planning a design and planting plan of the garden area adjacent to the memorial which HighGround will support with maintaining. You can follow our progress here. We hope in the future to be able to involve patients with visiting to look after and see the space.
RCOT group
I gave a presentation at the regional RCOT group to outline my role as a Horticultural Therapist at DMRC Stanford Hall. I incorporated a timeline of the use of Horticultural Therapy with the military which we intend to further develop following on from this so watch this space…
Scarecrows.
Team HighGround.
Friends of the Tenth memorial.
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