This therapy garden is located at the soon-to-open women's shelter in Stony Rapids. (submitted photo/Pamela Huerto)

By Derek Cornet

mental health

Therapy garden featured at Stony Rapids women’s shelter

Jul 30, 2019 | 12:27 PM

The new women’s shelter set to open in Stony Rapids this September will include a therapy garden for clients.

“We’ve had a lot of great success with our gardening projects and they’ve really had a good impact on mental health,” Athabasca Health Authority (AHA) Health Promotions Manager Pamela Huerto said. “We thought maybe installing a therapy garden at the shelter would give the women a place to heal, tend to something else and kind of empower them by growing their own food and [having] their own space.”

The idea for the project was brought up back in January 2018 when Frank Tecklenburg of Earth Connections was at Stony Rapids School. He was installing garden towers in each classroom and informed Huerto that placing a therapy garden at the women’s shelter would be a good idea. Huerto stated others in the health authority were also supportive of the idea and a plan was put in place.

The therapy garden was completed in June and Huerto mentioned it turned out to be a beautiful space. It includes walking paths, raised flower beds, a gazebo, as well as fruit bearing plants and trees. Clients will be able to harvest apples, blueberries, chokecherries and raspberries.

“I’m happy they incorporated so many different ways to include food,” she said. “Even if the women don’t feel like using the garden beds, themselves and the children can still gather fruit whenever they want.”

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Tecklenburg has been working with AHA for three years and he stated his company has worked with 27 different First Nations in Saskatchewan alone. He said the therapy garden is meant to provide stress relief to clients who are having troubled times. It can also be a place of solace or simply somewhere they can walk around to collect their thoughts.

This aerial photo shows the shelter and garden. (submitted photo/Pamela Huerto)

Due to the short growing season in the far North, planners were quite selective in the plants and trees chosen for the space. Techlenburg added they were purchased very mature, so they have a chance of surviving in the region.

“What we wanted to do specifically is take this therapy garden and incorporate portions and parts of a food forest,” he said. “It not only became a place where people can find tranquility, but they can also use it at the women’s shelter as a place to grow food, as well as a place where the folks who are there have an area they can have a cook out, get together and share in their healing.”

The women’s shelter, which was named Sa kew chu sa’kew ko’ni kwa meaning “a home for women and children’s shelter” in Dene, consists of six rooms with 24 beds. The name was chosen through a community contest and construction on the $3 million shelter began in October 2018.

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derek.cornet@jpbg.ca

Twitter: @saskjourno