a massive thanks to those who came and helped at the last work day, we really appreciate the support, it means we can get so much more achieved. We harvested potatoes, tomatoes, chard, landcress and chives. The food is there to be harvested by the community, we are not sure this is obvious to people, we are organising a display so that when you visit the library it is clear you can go out and pick. It will also tell you what is ready to be harvested and what plants you can take seeds from. We also planted up a parsley, cabbage, winter radish, spinach and salad leaves
WORKDAYS/GATHERINGS DATES AND DETAILS OF EVENTS
We have 3 more work/social days coming up this year 20th Oct/24th Nov/15th Dec 11am till 1pm, we will be doing an autumn tidy up and collecting seed for our seedbank. It is also intended as a social event so please pop down and find out what we are up to and how you can get involved. At this months get together we will be chatting about future development and planning our Autumn event for the gardens which will be held on 27th October. Friends old and new - please join us for our Autumn celebration down at the library garden, we will have all the usual permaculture and Nettle info plus any produce/harvest we have. We will have the community seedbank, willow weaving and making blackberry oxymel. Refreshments and drinks will be available and we will have activities on for the kids.
We are still trying to get a regular group of volunteers together to maintain and develop the gardens along permaculture principles, so please come along and find out more if you are interested.
We are hosting a couple of meetings for our Nettle collective which is an on-going Community project collectively experimenting with Nettle fibre extraction, processing and application. We will be meeting on the same dates as we are having the workdays and will follow on from the workdays starting at 1pm till 3pm. This is where we are up to so far:
For our first meeting we met at Londonderry playing fields in order the support the Save Londonderry lane playing fields group. The council has proposed to build a swimming centre for the commonwealth games here, we are against these plans for a number of reasons. In brief the site is not suitable for such a build in geological terms or in terms of the surrounding infrastructure, we believe there are more appropriate sites elsewhere in the borough. We also want to save and help develop what little green space we have as it is imperative for health and wellbeing, environment and wildlife. There are also wider issues here about council transparency and accountability. It is also a fantastic place to harvest nettle!
20/10 - All our previously collected stems should be retted and dried by now so we will be breaking and scutching (the stems)
if you did not come and collect stems on our first meet we will have spare stems you can work with. We will also save the woody pith to experiment making paper with. Please bring gloves and a rounded stone about the size of your palm.
24/11- We will card up and spin the fibres
15/12- Paper making and deciding how we want to further experiment with the fibre in the new year eg.crochet, weaving, art projects
As part of our work with The WildWood Emporium we started the Seedlings home ed group based in the gardens. Sessions have been running now for a few months. Its a fantastic space for the children to explore, they have also adopted one of the raised beds which has established really well and contains all kinds of tasty veg and interesting insects! At the last session we had a great time planting garlic, weaving fish and making magical potions.
We will be starting a very exciting project in the new year involving building a Raspberry PI weather station and nature cam. We meet every 2 weeks on a Friday and also once a month on a Saturday at a local allotment site. If you would to know more about the sessions please get in touch through our contacts page.
Moving forward into the new year we are looking our development plans for the garden which need updating as well as continuing on with our nettle fibre project.at We are still in desperate need of volunteers for the community garden...we would love to get together a little dedicated band of peeps to help us maintain and develop the space...it has so much potential ...we have been chatting about maybe a different time to set the workday/socials would help...so if you have ever thought about coming along please let us know when is good for you we would love to meet you.