A very Happy Christmas to you all! What a year it has been in the garden! This time last year we were still awaiitng the lease and the only real progress we had been able to make was cutting back some of the brambles and planting our heritage fruit trees in the orchard.
Since then we have finalised the lease, as well as planning permission for all the projects we have in mind, secured the whole garden with fencing, laid down the carpark as well as an accesible path that takes you in a loop around the whole garden. We have dug out the pond, put in the raised mount, planted whips along the Summer's road fence line to start creating a hedgerow and erected a deadhedge along one side of the firepit! The progress has been amazing to see and be part of!
And on top of this, we have been growing! Making a few raised beds allowed some remarkable vegatable beds to be developed and the result was a really good harvest, despite the lack of water on the site! We hope to get connected to running water in February, and our composting toliet is not far off being completed (see the photo below, with Dr Cook trying it out for size!!)
We want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who has taken part in the garden this year; every person who has come down on a Wednesday or a Saturday has contributed to the development of the project, and we are so grateful to the fantastic response we had to the bigger pieces of work (such as planting the whips along the fence when we had around 40 eager tree planters on site - see the photo below). We also thorouhgly enjoyed the wreath making workshop when our garden designer, Karen Blight, inspired nearly 40 people to make beautiful wreaths in time for Christmas - raising £600 for the garden in the process! Thank you all so much, and a very Happy Christmas to you all!
The garden will be open as usual on Saturdays throughout the Christmas period, but please note that we WILL NOT HAVE A SESSION on Wednesday 27th December.
We will continue with the regular Wednesday and Saturday sessions in the new year, and can't wait for the spring to arrive when we will have such a great garden to be growing in! We hope to get the polytunnel in place by then and will be lining the pond and planting the sensory garden! Do come along whenever you can, to see what is happening and take part if you are able!
