New Routes: November 2008
by Jill Coleman
Well, the Open Day at the orchard was a great success. In the middle of a grey, chilly week, blighted with squally showers, the weather was kind to us on the day and offered up blue skies and fluffy white clouds. We had a good turn out, with almost all of the Youth Service team, plus their teachers, and all of the learners who attended our Centre that morning.
The Groundworks Trust did us proud, supplying a buffet lunch as well as running the workshops. The apples that we picked last month were retrieved from storage and were cored, chopped and put through the juicer for everyone to sample. Meanwhile another group were out in the orchard, learning how to plant daffodil bulbs. Sadly the pruning workshop had to be cancelled, as Tom the visiting horticulturalist had hurt his back earlier in the week. It’s a pity, as I was hoping to grab him for some advice on how to deal with our unruly grape and kiwi fruit vines.
Such events always go a way to raising the profile of the project, but they also serve another purpose. We very often find that if we ask people if they would like to try some gardening they refuse straight away because they understand horticulture to be a damp, cold and dirty activity involving lots of digging in the mud.
An Open Day gives us an opportunity to challenge these preconceptions. Yes, there is a bit of good old-fashioned digging for those that enjoy it – in fact, for some of the workers, it’s easier to get them to dig over our vegetable patch than it is to persuade them to do the washing up! However, the general set up is to ensure a more therapeutic style: lots of raised beds and a big polytunnel to allow a working area under cover.
We run whole sessions based around garden-themed arts and crafts which range from painting watercolours of our flowers through making bird feeders to planting up hanging baskets. While we want to sell what we grow we want, more importantly, for our learners to have a positive experience of community gardening, because this is what will make them want to return and then build up their confidence and abilities.
We do a lot of our heavier work on a Friday morning when we have a large group of physically able workers. This week they shifted two tons of topsoil between them to fill up some of the remaining raised beds. If the weather holds for the end of this week we should get those beds finished off ready for planting up in the spring. We just need to construct a set of cloches to fit over some of them so we don’t lose so much to pests. We were overwhelmed by carrot fly this summer, and we also realised one of the disadvantages of having a thriving butterfly bed: a plague of caterpillars.
The cuttings are doing well in the polytunnel, and we’ve started off some perennials for next year too, plus several trays of wildflowers for the orchard. I’d say that the polytunnel is almost as full as it is in the spring, although everything is well wrapped up in fleece. Fingers crossed now that we get everything through the winter to give us a nice stock of plants for next year.
