Developing market gardening for a place in the sun

«  Seriousness, confidence, motivation.To me, that's the impression that emerges from the project advanced by an association already recognized for the quality and the results of its action.  »

Gérard Etcheverry

When it was launched in 1992, a professional integration association took the name of Déméter, the Greek goddess of agriculture and harvests, to symbolize its areas of action: the rehabilitation of fallow land, market gardening, horticulture, and the creation and animation of teaching gardens.Les Jardins de Déméter applies to persons experiencing serious difficulties (earning the French Government minimum, former prison inmates, handicapped persons, long-term unemployed, etc.) to whom it offers social assistance as well as vocational training.

Fifteen years of experience and good results (60% of the persons received find a job or skills training at the end of the integration course) have led the community of communes Entre Seine and Forêt (the location of the commune of Vulaines, one of the anchor points of Jardins de Déméter) to place a 6 000 m² plot at the disposal of the association.

Advantages of pooling

Within this large area, Les Jardins de Déméter will be able to pool all its departments/offices, technical rooms and farmland - and ease a number of restrictive aspects of its present organization (costly sprinkling of the tree nursery with mains water - the new plot has a well - constant sharing of tools, incessant travel for the personnel).

To do this, it will install a bungalow for the women's sanitary blocks, build wooden chalets for the administrative departments, a training room, dressing rooms, the kitchen and dining room, and, finally, rehabilitate a shed and two crop tunnels.

Thanks to these arrangements, Les Jardins de Déméter will be able to boost its receiving capacity and integrate from the present fourteen to twenty employees.This will also mean more varied produce, offered for sale to the members and the population of the neighboring communes at markets organized on the association's site.All these factors augur well for a long and prosperous career.