Gardening season is in full swing, and the community garden has been a hive of activity recently. We started our Saturday sessions with the Family Gardening Club. Both the May and early June sessions were fun, and we even started to have regular families joining us, which is lovely to see. The children took to the gardening tasks very easily, and they all worked very nicely together. At the May activity we decorated birdfeeders, learnt about wildlife gardening, and planted out some tomato and pumpkin seedlings.
During the June session we made wooden planters, decorated them and sown some edible flower and vegetable seeds. We also had a look around in the garden, checked out the wormery and the mini pond, admired the seedlings that we had sown at the previous session-they already started to grow! The kids had also sown some sunflower seeds, and we are very excited to see how tall the sunflowers will grow! Our next Family Gardening Club is on Saturday 13th July, and we would like to welcome even more families to join us for gardening adventures!
At the July session we are going to create some community art, and plant up two herb planters. For this summer we also have plans to create a bog garden and a second mini pond. One of our regular club members, Bluebell suggested to call the group Ecological Club, so from now on it will be called Family Eco Club.
May was very busy with community group visits too. Cando Care had spent a very sunny afternoon in the garden, sowing seeds of spinach, radish and turnips, and decorating seed markers. On another sunny afternoon I joined them for their 10th Anniversary party to celebrate the great work they are doing in providing care and support for elderly and vulnerable community members. They are already looking forward to their June visit, and in preparation the clients were sowing sunflower seeds at their care centre, and they already re-potted the seedlings, ready to plant out in the community garden.
Headway East Northants also visited in May, and they started with the sunflower seeds too. Let`s see whose flowers will grow the tallest (it's not really a competition though…). They also created wooden planters, and we put in some of the seedlings they had sown earlier in March-we have lovely marigolds and calendulas- they will be in bloom very soon! The group members have also sown some runner beans and planted out cucumber and butternut squash plants. They had such a nice time, one of the clients even decided to apply for volunteering with us!
Our endless supply of broad beans has come to an end, but we still had a couple of deliveries to Encompass-some of them got huge literally overnight! There are also lovely strawberries growing, the first early potatoes need topping up, and the vegetable seedlings are doing well too.
June will be a very exciting month, our shed base and cooking station had been installed yesterday by GAME Constructions , our picnic bench, and shed will be assembled by our fantastic volunteers later this week.
Bosworth Garden Centre kindly offered to help us with some advice on our drought garden, and they will provide some lovely plants too. This will be happening sometimes in June, and we will use a large, donated tractor tyre for this project. All three community group visits are booked in for June, and volunteer team building days are planned to take place in the garden area. Here`s to another busy month, with hopefully more sunshine and summery weather!
