Vegetable gardens aren’t just for your backyard or neighborhood community – they’re for the office too! We’re so excited to share the communication written by Orica’s Jennifer Dunne – who has been documenting the excitement and progress surrounding the Watkins location’s corporate garden built by the company’s gardening committee and Nest Health Connections.

Jennifer shares the stress-relieving benefits of getting your hands dirty, alongside employees' excitement about the availability of locally-grown produce.

Check out Jennifer's communication below, and let us know if a corporate garden is something that YOU are interested in for YOUR company or corporation!

How Orica’s Watkins Office is Building Community One Veggie at a Time
by Jennifer Dunne, Communications at Orica Watkins

Vegging out at work might not sound super productive, but the Orica Watkins office gardening committee has plenty of productivity to show for their hard work with the debut of their new corporate vegetable garden located on the site. The planning for this initiative started last year when a Health and Wellness survey of Watkins employees indicated strong support to start a corporate garden – more than half of the respondents rated it as highly desired.

A corporate garden is not a new concept, many large organizations, businesses and neighborhoods have launched similar projects with wonderful success and a laundry list of benefits. A recent study in the Netherlands, cited by CNN, suggests that gardening can fight stress even better than other relaxing leisure activities. After completing a stressful task, two groups of people were instructed to either read indoors or garden for 30 minutes. Afterward, the group that gardened reported being in a better mood than the reading group, and they also had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

But you don’t have to rattle off the benefits to the gardening committee at Watkins, they are already seeing positive results from getting their hands dirty. “It’s been such a great experience to work alongside my co-workers on the planning and building of the beds, starting the seeds from scratch, putting the plants into the ground and then pulling out the first radishes this week,” said Mary West, Demand Planner – North America and gardening committee chair.

Later this summer the garden should also produce a wide variety of vegetables including carrots, peppers, jalapenos and tomatillos, various herbs and delicious mini watermelons, and juicy strawberries. “We’re looking forward to sharing a lot of these items with our employees at a Friday BBQ. It will be fun to tell them they were literally grown 50 yards away, you can’t get much fresher than that,” said West.

blog post written by Rae Ehly

Nest Health Connections

Nest Health Connections is a corporate wellness company revolutionizing health and happiness in the workplace. We create holistic customized wellness programs for employers and their employees.