New Routes: March 2009

 by Jill Coleman

It has been so nice to see the sun at last and actually to feel warm when we are at work. Only a couple of weeks ago we could only make out the first stirrings of early growth on the New Routes site. Now the gardens are splashed with bright patches of colour as bulbs and spring flowers respond to the early heat.

The polytunnel is already starting to look quite full now as we have many trays of seeds on the go, some of which are now ready for pricking out. We have had quite a thorough sort out of the overwintering plants and composted anything that didn’t make it. The pots in the coldframes have been moved onto the shelving in the compound, so that the cuttings can come out into the coldframes to make room for the increasing trays of seedlings.

In the first year that the MacIntyre Horticulture Project worked on the site we went into a bit of a sowing frenzy as we were so excited to have a great big growing space for the first time. We quickly found ourselves out of space and swamped with hundreds of trays of cramped and spindly seedlings that desperately needed repotting, but without the time or workers to do it. Needless to say, quite a lot of trays ended up as compost. Today we are a lot more restrained and we sow only what we will use ourselves or sell. We split seed packets between trays as many of our learners do not have the manual dexterity to handle tiny seedlings; fewer plants in each tray means that we can leave them to get a bit bigger and therefore easier to manage. We have also found that mixing the seeds with silver sand before sowing makes it easier for learners to scatter them evenly over the compost. We have just started to sow into half-size trays too as the task of pricking out a full tray of little plants is often an overwhelming task for some people.

The allotment is coming along little by little. We have just started digging out our fourth bed. We reckon we can fit seven narrow beds down one side of the path, and two or three large ones on the other side. I am hoping that by Friday enough will have been dug to allow us to get some potatoes in during the last week of March, and there are some broad beans ready to go in too. We are very lucky to have a trio of good volunteers who are more than willing to help us out with this heavy work – we would really struggle without them.

Our Sensory / Healing Garden is all planned and costed out now. We are just waiting for the results of a couple of grant applications before we proceed any further. I’m just hoping that the land isn’t as bad as the ground in the Youth Service allotments – the lads dug up a wonderful selection of dumped objects from their patches today, including some well rotted carpet and an old ironing board. However, the Healing Garden has the potential to be a much broader community project, involving many more people than the Macintyre and Youth Service learners that currently work the site: local schools and community associations, for example. It should also raise the profile of the Project too as many people in the local area still do not realise that we are there or are open to the public or that we sell plants and produce. We are hoping that this will be remedied during this year and that New Routes will be placed ‘on the map’ as it were.

The MacIntyre gardeners had a bit of a morning off last Friday and joined in the Comic Relief festivities. They went collecting around the park and allotments and raised about £40 between them.