70 years since the first ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign started in world war two, the public will once again be creating allotments and gardening parks to keep morale high in Pembrokeshire.

Based in St. Ishmael’s volunteers will be transforming a derelict space into a place where birds can live, plants can grow, and people can learn about sustainable living.

The Dig for Victory (D4V) project is one of the schemes created by the VC gallery charity based in Haverfordwest.

The project’s ambassador is Audrey, who lives in a care home in Pembroke Dock, but in her earlier days was an a land army girl who took part in the original D4V campaign in world war two.

Sean Golder, the project manager said: “This is a new exciting project which has been funded by the Armed Forces Covenant. We are aiming to encourage ex-military personnel along with members of the community to get involved in our Gardening project.”

On St. David’s day the project kicked off it’s work with a number of volunteers who created vegetable patches at their base at St. Ishmael’s.

Volunteers on St. David's day

Western Telegraph:

Anyone from the community can become a volunteer by contacting the VC gallery, or their Facebook page ‘The VC Gallery Dig for Victory’.

At the moment they are only working with controlled groups for this project due to Covid-19, but hope to incorporate bigger groups when is safe to do so.

The VC gallery founder Barry John thanked the Armed Forces Covenant for funding this project and said: “It’s a really cool project, and we look forward to seeing the results.”

When asked what inspired the project Barry said that the gallery work with a lot of elderly war veterans whose gardens had overgrown during lockdown, to the point where they couldn’t see out of their windows.

Since then he has helped clear their gardens with the VC gallery community, and these trips is part of what inspired the D4V project.