Culture Fusion meadow and garden

It was the first task of the year, so as is usual we spent the day at the tool store. We took the edged tools to the workshop and made sure that they were sharp. Other tools were cleaned and oiled. The tool inventory list was checked and the tool store was tidied. The PPE was tidied and we managed to repair some of the broken tools. Now all is ready for the conservation work that we have planned over the coming months. 

Today we worked with 7 volunteers.

Click here to see other photos of the day.

As there were two projects today, we started the day with a meeting to inform people of the projects and decide which one they wanted to be involved with.  The people who wanted to join the café got straight on with preparing apples for the fruit press by washing and chopping them.  Other people got to work on the Culture Fusion meadow area. This had to be cut and raked off and we used a combination of our hand tools and mower. Cutting and raking will benefit the wild flowers sown and will help to make a good display next year. It is now encouraging after its poor start that there is nearly a complete coverage of green plants. At the same time the raised beds were weeded, the trees that will make up the hedge are looking in ok and will hopefully continue to grow next year.

The pop up café was set up in the YMCA shop and was soon of really nice offerings like apple bread and butter pudding and apple and lemon tart. This was popular with passing shoppers. Then the juicer got going and his drew a good deal of attention. Passing shoppers were encouraged to taste the fresh juice and find out about the seasonal offerings. It was great to be in such a prominent position in the town to promote and share the harvest.

Today we worked with 16 volunteers.

Click here to see other photos of the day.

Wow!

What an achievement. Not only did we shift about 11 tons of drainage substrate and top soil, we also completed the tasks of planting the hedge and seeding the wildflower meadow on the first floor and planting on the fifth floor garden.

We have attempted to do this several times in the past 6 months; first the structure wasn't ready, then it was too windy, then we realised there was a turf guard over the entire meadow that would make it hard to weed and control the inevitable docks and dandelions, then the area was being used for a training day... In the end we decided to put the seed in the fridge to mimic the winter conditions needed to stimulate germination for some species and try again later.

And now it is done. The trees are a mix of native species; birch, alder, hawthorn, field maple, hazel, rowan and a few dog rose.

The wildflower meadow is a mix of 70% fine grasses and 30% wildflowers. One zone has low growing species whilst the other has taller growing species, and there are a couple of patches with just wildflowers.

The area will be a no-go zone (except for watering...the rain on Saturday was very welcome!) for the next few months but we have created a Meadow gallery and page on the website and we will keep you up to date with progress.

Once again, massive congratulations to all 26 people who contributed today.

We will be continuing the construction of protective shelters for our tender crops.

We will be constructing a frame for the raised beds, so we can protect tender plants such as tomatoes and chillies.

We will be building wooden raised beds with some larch sleepers, sowing veg and wildflower seeds and doing a general sort out of the garden in preparation for the growing season.

We will be carrying out plant maintenance tasks including planting, watering and weeding.

Please get in touch if you would like to join the session.

10.30-3.00pm. We will be weeding,  planting and constructing a compost bin. We also need to carry out repairs on our poly beds.

Please get in touch if you'd like to join us.

Volunteers worked on the roof garden and meadow, weeding, sowing seeds, potting up seedlings and repairing cloches and other structures to give protection to vegetables, and general sorting and tidying. 

We are at Culture Fusion again tomorrow at least to start with, the tomatoes need staking and supporting, courgettes and runner beans planting out, we are nearly there with weeding the meadow, (one last push), oxeye daisies need spreading out around the meadow. etc  

We can go up to the nature reserve later if we decide we want to. (we don't have a minibus driver for tomorrow, so we could walk, car or taxi).

Continuing with the roof garden. We will be building bed/mini greenhouse for tomatoes, staking tomatoes, planting vegetables, weeding the meadow, sowing seeds, potting up seedlings etc.

Continuing with the roof garden. We will be building bed/mini greenhouse for tomatoes, staking tomatoes, planting vegetables, weeding the meadow, sowing seeds, potting up seedlings etc.

We spent the day back at base preparing the roof garden for the forthcoming growing season.

We prepared for planting tomatoes, by repairing the “mini-greenhouses”, covering the wooden frames with the plastic coverings. We also got the cloches out, repairing and cleaning them. These were used to protect, tender vegetables; tomato seedlings, courgettes and sweetcorn. We sowed some Runner beans and French beans, to be planted out later. We also created a new home for a homeless apricot tree; it is now growing against a sun trap wall, so hopefully it will do well.
We gave the meadow some care, weeding the dandelions etc ; that got a hold during the dry weather last summer, (seeding in the bare patches where the grass temporarily died down). We transplanted wildflower seedlings that had also seeded themselves well, around the meadow to give a more even distribution and potted up some Oxeye Daisies to be grown on for future use on other sites and projects. 
 

More minibus trouble so we had to abandon our plans to go tree planting at Ogden reservoir. 

Instead we undertook the essential task of removing some of the dandelions from the meadow at Culture Fusion, as well as weeding the growing beds.  

We made a short trip up to the orchard as well to check if the gales had done any damage. We had to replace some of the covering on the apple store but we were pleased to see no damage had been done to the trees.