Only residents in the following areas can participate:
View mode
- Cards
- List
Garden @ the Snake
2025-05-11 • 4 comments • • Grow Your Own fund
Vision and Purpose:
This community garden will serve as a multifunctional space that:
- Provides a calm and beautiful resting place for individuals using the active travel networks.
- Engages local people in food-growing practices, offering an accessible way to connect with urban agriculture.
- Supports biodiversity, linking nature networks in Roseburn Path, Union Canal, and Dalry Cemetery, mitigating habitat loss caused by the cycle path development.
- Improves soil permeability to absorb rainfall and reduce flooding risks on Russell Road.
- Promotes community wellbeing by providing a shared space where local people can gather, share knowledge, and engage in meaningful activities that strengthen local connections and deepen community ties.
- Promotes individual wellbeing by enabling people to reconnect with nature, contributing to mental and emotional health through hands-on engagement with soil, plants, and local wildlife.
Environmental resilience and food security:
- Permaculture techniques to manage natural resources at the garden.
- Careful rainwater management (waste water runoff collection by plumbing runoff pipes from cycle path railway bridge into water butts, rain water collection in landscaped swales)
- Improvement of soil structure, stability and nutrient density (Focussing on perennial plants as much as possible to reduce soil disruption, adding organic matter back into the soil with compost and green manure, improving soil water permeability and water retention through surface mulching)
- Natural pollination and pest management by co-planting veg/fruit with flowers and herbs to attract pollinators and pest-managing insects like ladybirds.
Access to food growing knowledge and green skills:
- By encouraging community learning and informed participation in community composting, demonstrated by a fantastic project in Lancaster where residents could take a quick induction course in order to make sure compost composition and maintenance was correct. More community involvement means more compost, which means more food!
- Volunteers at the garden will learn hands-on about food growing, and funding could allow guest experts to come in to teach skills, or to help run interactive sessions.
Redhall Grows
2025-05-12 • No comments • • Grow Your Own fund
Redhall Grows would utilise the current garden space we have for growing food, cooking, and enjoying it together. We would implement raised beds, along with a polytunnel, to grow a variety of fruit and vegetables. Each of our nine classes would take an active role in the planting and tending to our food growing project. It would also become a key part of our outdoor learning sessions and Eco Group remit. At the moment, we are quite limited in funding for fresh fruits and vegetables for our children to try. The food grown in our garden project could become an incredible tool for our children’s communication. Most of our children are nonspeaking and utilise alternative types of communication. Their diets are also frequently quite limited. Trying new things and learning how to indicate what they like and don’t like would be an invaluable activity for our learners.
Further to the empowering benefits of our learners being able to grow food from seed and figure out what they do and don’t like, with an outdoor kitchen and pizza oven, the garden could be used to cooking sessions (life skills related to health and wellbeing are a large part of our curriculum).
To involve parents and the local community, we would aim to host a series of food-related engagements within the garden, such as a pizza night and a soup night. We would signpost this widely to draw in local community members into the life of our school.
We are currently working on achieving our Green Flag award with Eco Schools, and are hoping to create a more sustainable environment for our leaners and the wider community.