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Eat more fruits and vegetables,” says every doctor everywhere-the kind of vague advice easily forgotten when passing apples on the way to the end-of-season ice cream sandwiches on sale at the store. So a clinic in Virginia has decided to get specific. Health care providers tear a page from a prescription pad, then walk with their patients out the back door and into what they say is the best kind of produce aisle and pharmacy: the garden row.

Health care, healthy eating, and nutritional subsidy programs commingle in The New River Health District Farmacy Garden in Christiansburg, a new collaboration between the Virginia Department of Health’s New River Health District and Montgomery County’s Virginia Cooperative Extension. The way it works is simple: Volunteers do all of the gardening work, and after an hour pitching in to weed or harvest or seed new crops, the gardeners-patients of the clinic and women who qualify for Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children-go home with a bag of fruits and vegetables.

More than a dozen separate groups in the community gave money, materials, or time to its creation, and it’s the second garden project from the New River Health District.

“The clientele we see have no money, some of them have nothing, and fresh fruits and vegetables are very expensive,” Raschid Ghoorahoo, a nurse practitioner at the clinic, told
The Roanoke Times. “Cheap fast and processed foods [exacerbate] their conditions, but they can’t afford the fresh.”

“If they come garden, they get moderate activity,” said Meredith Ledlie Johnson, a health educator at the Virginia Cooperative Extension’s Family Nutrition Program, whose job centers around increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables and counteracting food deserts. “It’s everything all in one”-exercise, healthy food, and both ownership of and appreciation for where dinner is coming from.

It’s a clever combination of two movements happening in food and health: the USDA’s emphasis on gardens and farmers markets in communities and schools, and the rise of non-pharmaceutical wellness “prescriptions.” Instead of scribbling out a drug dosage, some doctors are asking patients to incorporate good habits of self-care (like more movement and leafy greens) into their routine, not just as rote advice but as a medical directive-often
before their health goes haywire. Doctor’s orders.