New Routes: October 2008
With our rather soggy summer waving a forlorn farewell from the horizon, autumn is now well and truly upon us. Rather than spending the season in rest and reflection, though, it’s all been busy, busy, busy here at New Routes as we start to plan ahead for next year.
One of our partner organisations, Groundworks, have a Celebration Day planned for the end of the month, so the groups have been feverishly tidying and clearing the site. The Youth Service team are back after their summer break with a lot of fresh faces, so it’s good for them to make a fresh start. They have just cleared most of their raised beds, and dug over and covered their vegetable patch, just leaving enough space for some onion sets.
We finally completed building and setting in the 2 x 1m raised beds in our own growing area. We had planned to have the work complete back in June, perhaps a tad ambitious in retrospect, but how wonderful it is to walk down to the back of the polytunnel and see something that only existed as a rough sketch at the start of this year. And considering that the rough sketch was mine, it’s no small wonder that the twelve beds fit into the area as they should, leaving room for both a path and a compost bay! All credit to our learners, though. Everyone played a part, from building the boxes to slapping on the paint.
We had some vile weather at the start of last week, but it was good to have some time to plan and buy in some stocks. I took the Wednesday group out last week to pick up some onions and garlic and some tulip bulbs to brighten up our butterfly bed next spring. We also had another day dodging torrential downpours as the groups came together to pick our harvest of apples.
The two-year old orchard has done quite well this year, although we had no joy with our soft fruit, and the Morello cherries were stripped off the tree by the magpies (big nets next year I think). Nevertheless we managed to pick several bags of different varieties, including Cox’s Orange Pippin, Elton Beauty, James Grieve and Arthur Barnes. These have been carefully cleaned, wrapped and stored ready for the Celebration Day.
It’s always good to see the teams bonding like this; it is, after all, why the community garden was set up, to involve people from different social backgrounds and to get them working together. I’m not sure how many of our learners from either group had ever tasted a freshly picked apple, straight from the tree before, let alone been encouraged to describe the different flavours of each variety.
