| Joy, Purpose and Connection through Gardening
| Last year, Eugeria, a Montreal-based company specializing in dementia care solutions, acquired and relaunched Eldergrow, a garden activity designed for ease and interactivity. “Eldergrow has always been about growing seeds of joy, purpose, and connection,” said Orla Concannon, founder of Eldergrow. “I’m so grateful to see it bloom in new ways with Eugeria.” We spoke to Breanne Hargreaves, who leads the company’s marketing and products efforts.
Memory care staff need activities to be simple to operate. How does Eldergrow work?
At its core, Eldergrow is a set of monthly lessons and activities that we design specifically for memory care. Some communities have their own gardens and simply access the lessons online. Other communities have our hydroponic gardens, and for them we deliver a seasonal box with all the plants they’re going to grow and the supporting materials for the lessons.
The garden itself is really plug and play. We work with a company in Estonia called Click & Grow, that has little plant pods with everything the plant needs already inside. You drop them in a row, put the cover on, and off they go. If the basin needs water, the lights flash gently to let you know. It’s a simple hydroponic system, no chemicals, nothing you can really get wrong.
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What kind of support do you offer staff?
The goal with Eldergrow is that we’ve done all the prep work ahead of time. We have an expert who’s been writing this kind of programming for memory care for over 10 years; she designs and updates our lessons so everything is thought out in advance.
Every lesson comes with a list of supplies, how to prepare and step by step guidance. They even include how to engage different residents depending on their abilities and interests. There is a digital portal online with all of the resources, including a video for every lesson if you’d rather watch than read, and other videos to help you run your nature program and keep your garden growing well.
Each themed lesson also comes with a list of supporting daily activities tied to that theme (at least one a day for the month), whether that’s a video, a printable activity, or a playlist. If you want to build the theme out across the month, you have everything you need.
And for communities with the hydroponic garden specifically, we’ve thought hard about making it as easy as possible to just have a garden, period. I always joke that I have a negative green thumb (I’m the one in charge of the garden at our office), and it’s grown everything you can think of, despite me. The hydroponic system is low-mess, low-stress: you pop in the pods, they grow on their own, no risk of over- or under-watering. It’s thought through so care teams don’t have to worry about the gardening side of things.
What kinds of plants will residents grow?
With the hydroponic garden, you get a seasonal box every couple of months with a variety of plants: flowers, herbs, and some edibles too, like lettuces or strawberries in summer. Each pod ties back to an activity, and there’s a card you can tuck into the row so residents know what’s growing there. Every garden also comes with a welcome box that includes cards on how to engage residents in the day-to-day care of the garden, so they can be involved in watching things grow. And everything we send, from the pod to the leaf to any fruit, is safe if it’s ever eaten, so that’s accounted for too.
What accommodations are necessary?
It’s less about accommodations and more that every lesson is designed with adaptation built in, thinking through someone’s cognitive or physical ability to participate. On the back of each garden card, there’s an “adapting for ability” section with guidance on how to adjust if someone needs a physical or cognitive adaptation, and also how to add more engagement for residents who want to go deeper.
What lessons have you learned about how residents use Eldergrow?
I think the biggest lesson is that there’s no nature without nurture. We’ve designed the program to be well thought out and easy to use, but it still takes someone caring about the garden for it to thrive.
Also, it’s always fun to see what people choose to do with it. We structure a lesson, but you never know what that’s going to look like once somebody picks it up. One of the stories I love: there’s an activity built around the song “Scarborough Fair,” which included parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Somebody came in with a guitar and did the whole song. It’s lovely to see people take it and really own it, and take it to the next level.
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