Every weekend (and on some weekdays too) a work party is called up from local volunteers to tend the park and plant edibles in hitherto unproductive and often neglected green spaces within the funded area around the Horsefair. Here are a few pictures from the 27 June Work Party in St George's Park.
Well the Let's Eat the Park the LEAP Project has had its first year and we are pleased with the progress made so far. Our activities have aroused interest from partners and collaborators from not just the locality, or even the county - but all across the country from the Royal Horticultural Society, to the Skipton Building Society - the LEAP logo has been seen far and wide during the past 12 months. Flexibility is built into the design so a LEAP team member could for example visit a Three Sisters Garden in London and then establish one in St George's Park within a week with the support and approval of the whole LEAP team. This is DIY co-design undertaken by people with a vision rather than a blueprint the details of which change with every challenge encountered and overcome - LEAP is an exercise in community resilience. Every weekend (and on some weekdays too) a work party is called up from local volunteers to tend the park and plant edibles in hitherto unproductive and often neglected green spaces within the funded area around the Horsefair. Here are a few pictures from the 27 June Work Party in St George's Park.
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The New St George by the Albion Band seems a perfect soundtrack to our work party today when more edibles including courgettes, leeks and tumbling tomatoes were added to the ever expanding list of fruit and vegetables planted by the LEAP team over the past 11 months.
Today's work party divided their attention between the bays of St George's church and the park. Blackcurrants and gooseberries were planted and the boundary of the park was also readied for sowing wild flower seed. Representations have recently been made to a local social landlord with regard to planting their under-utilised green spaces with edibles. We are currently awaiting their response to our expression of interest. Meanwhile things move forward apace. Last weekend's St George's free family festival publicised LEAP and elicited feedback, all of it very positive - on the project and our vision of edible green spaces in the Horsefair and surrounding areas. We have a lot of new seedlings that will soon be planted out in various existing LEAP sites in St George's Park, Baxter Avenue, Baxter Gardens Park and St George's churchyard. The fruit tree population has burgeoned since the project started less than a year ago and there are now apple, pear, plum, almond, damson, cherry, quince, mulberry, mirabelle and a chutney hedge comprising of hazel, elder, blackthorn, rosehips and hawthorn. We have planted local varieties like the Worcester black pear, Shropshire Prune damsons and Warwickshire Drooper plums amongst others. The LEAP project has also reintroduced cherries to what was until the early 20th century a major cherry growing area. We have so far planted, or had local primary school children in collaboration with our WFDC parks department colleagues plant, four varieties of cherry so far Black Oliver, Summer Sun, Waterloo and Stella. All these fruit bearing trees are in place as part of the Let's Eat the Park vision of free nutritious food growing in an area where there is significant food poverty and high usage of the local Food Bank. We are planting the future of increased fruit, vegetable and herb availability across the LEAP locality, most of the results of which will not be seen until after the initial funding ends in 2016 and therefore beyond the life of LEAP as currently organised. However, we aim for sustainability - so we are looking beyond the two year project to an ever unfolding community based gardening initiative with LEAP as its originator and guiding principle.
May 2015 Five Let's Eat the Park volunteers attended a workshop on social and therapeutic horticulture this week in Birmingham, they learned a lot that day and through the networks they connected up to... they will continue to share information with new contacts, developing better understandings of ways to press forward with the LEAP project. So they had another significant day in the unfolding of the LEAP project which is now at the forefront of free food growing in our locality. Colleagues on the course took an interest in what we are doing here in Kidderminster - because it is evidence that communities can do things for themselves through creative engagement with each other. More analysis of the day on the LEAP blog but here are a few pictures of the day:-
The Baxter Gardens work party made real progress taking Let's Eat the Park beyond the park gates today and into a scrub bank that forms part of the approach to Baxter Gardens Park in Baxter Avenue Kidderminster. The weather was good and so was the turnout - involving 11 volunteers who responded to the call for help with the project. We had a very rewarding and enjoyable morning further transforming the bank into a beautiful and eventually partially edible green space, rather than an overgrown mostly untended and unproductive tangle of thicket that it was before. Today the team added apple and pear trees plus gooseberries, thyme and rosemary to the mix. Job well done thanks to the combined efforts of Friends of Baxter Gardens and Friends of St George's parks united in the aims of LEAP to make the area greener, more attractive and increasingly edible for all to enjoy.
Once again children from nearby St George's CE Primary School show their enthusiasm for LEAP and help plant fruit trees in the park along with WFDC Parks Department workers and LEAP volunteers. The planting on 10 February was part of an ongoing engagement with staff and students from St George's school, a partnership which precedes the Let's Eat the Park project and goes back to the planting of the chutney hedge in November 2011. Since that time, successive classes have planted edibles in St George's Park which now has enough fruit trees to legitimately call it an 'urban orchard', a large number of trees have been planted since the start of LEAP in 2014. The children also showed a lot of interest in the raised beds and also the raspberry canes and onion patch adjacent to the paddling pool. It's always great to have the children help us, even when they floor us with questions like "how many varieties of apples are there?" but also when they ask about things we can answer, like when the fruit can be picked. This engagement by children from the local area gives them (and us) a greater sense of ownership and pride in the park and the project too, not to mention a chance for them to get out of school to do things in the open air. The LEAP team gratefully thank all the students and teaching staff that took part in the planting as well as our WFDC colleagues and partners. Let's Eat the Park! In undertaking these tasks LEAP volunteers were making a number of important points about what makes our award winning project so special. Upcycling soil at the first work party of 2015 -the International Year of the Soils - demonstrates the high value we give to the soil that sustains all life on earth, an irreplaceable natural resource that all things in existence ultimately depend upon for survival. In December 2013 the General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed 2015 as the ‘International Year of Soils’ and 5 December of each year as the ‘World Soil Day’. If you click on the button above that takes you to the LEAP Blog you will see the blog for 5 December 2014 celebrates the first World Soil Day. The true value of the soil is the UN's message of the International Year of the Soils and Let's Eat the Park is at the cutting edge of this global awakening to the threats that face Planet Earth's green mantle. The LEAP team are doing what we can in our locality to nurture the soil and the upcycling on the ring road mini-landslide is a small practical act showing our commitment to the first International Year of the Soils 2015. LEAP in the Horsefair and Greenhill areas of Kidderminster - is acting locally but thinking globally. http://www.fao.org/soils-2015/en/?utm_source=faohomepage&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=featurebar Taking this wasted soil to put to productive use for growing edible plants in our recently constructed raised beds not only harmonises with International Year of the Soils but also with the re-use repair and recycle ethos of the Transition Movement and upcycling as a means of waste reduction in all of its many forms. We were given a dozen raspberry canes by one of the team which will be planted in Baxter Gardens Park at our next work party there as the other major green space in the LEAP area is further planted and developed. So a good start to 2015 in a collaborative effort that links a local resident-led and organised initiative in St George's Park, Kidderminster - to the United Nations and the multi-national Transition Movement - finding local solutions to global problems as part of a network of community sector, not-for-profit organisations all around the world. At the same time we are pressing forward with our campaign to reduce food poverty and loneliness while beautifying the locality and contributing to the enhanced wellbeing and resilience of the area. With the continued backing of the People's Health Trust, Wyre Forest Clinical Commissioning Group, Wyre Forest District Council, Project Dirt and individual supporters the LEAP team presses on to address health inequalities and social exclusion in our area from the grassroots upwards. If you want to be involved in Let's Eat the Park - or any of the other activities organised by Friends of St George's Park please contact us through our website or by email at [email protected] and come along and share your skills and ideas with us in return for the satisfaction, support and cameraderie we all get from this neighbourhood mutual aid project we have together created.
Hungry for More on Let's Eat the Park ChristmasTree etc? Then Feast Your Eyes on the latest LEAP blog here
http://leapstgeorges.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/the-leap-yule-blog-2014.html Or just click on the LEAP Blog Button Above Right - situated over RSS feed button - for lots more stuff on Let's Eat the Park LEAP Work Party We had a good day in St George's park planting for Let's Eat the Park. We had a good response to the call for a work party with Sue and Margaret doing a litter pick, while Barry, Marilyn, Nicky, Spike, Carol and Rob got on with planting red onions, garlic and more strawberries than you can shake a stick at. The onions and garlic went into the new planting area recently cleared by the Prince's Trust students near the paddling pool. The stawberries joined last year's crop on the wall garden between the shelter and the Radford Avenue perimeter path. WFDC parks department responded to our call to them to manage a waste disposal issue that had unexpectedly cropped up, once again demonstrating the value of the close relationship that exists between the Friends of the park and our local authority coproducers. The weather was very kind to us today given that it is the end of November, it was a lovely mild dry morning to be outdoors and working together planting the park with edibles and generally looking after our community green spaces. Not everyone is always as considerate as we might hope, but nothing daunts the passion of the LEAP team - drawn from local people - we see our vision unfolding in our neighbourhoods and we know we can make positive change happen, we already have a track record of change in our parks where LEAP is continuously moving forward. The 'feel good factor' of working together to maintain and increase the productivity of our park is experienced by all who take part. We think everybody benefits from a bit of 'green therapy' every once in a while and for that reason five LEAP team delegates will be attending a Thrive training event in Birmingham in the New Year. Thanks to funding from the People's Health Trust we are sending five volunteers to a course in Social and Therapeutic Gardening which gives an insight into the theory and practice of social and therapeutic horticulture and how gardening can be beneficial for peoples’ physical health and emotional well-being. We hope to benefit from the training in a number of ways, in the meantime we'll continue getting on with the practice in a haven for nature in the central zone of Kidderminster. |
AuthorThe Friends of St George's Park is a community sector constituted group that has been in existence since 2008. Categories |