The Friends of St George's Park have now planted the first edibles in the new LEAP raised beds. More on the work the Friends have done with Princes Trust students from Heart of Worcestershire College to develop the project in the LEAP blog and on the Latest News on the website (coming soon).
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Friends of St George's Park in partnership with Wyre Forest District Council and with advice from Disability Action Wyre Forest has this week seen the first of two raised beds installed in the park. The two-tier bed will soon be joined by a second to allow a significant increase in edibles that will be grown in the park as part of the Let's Eat the Park project. The raised beds are intended to be the focal point of the project which will fan out from them right across the park, into the community and up to our sister park at Baxter Gardens. Other LEAP sites have now been agreed at St George's Church, Baxter Gardens Park and its approaches, the Blue Bell and the Old Peacock pubs in the Horsefair. The Co-op Children's Centre has already given in principle agreement to host another LEAP site so the project has already spread well beyond the confines of St George's park involving an ever increasing number of partners and participants. If you are interested in being involved please use the contact form here on our website to get in touch - or email us at [email protected].
All Welcome! The Friends group are meeting in the park by the shelter at 10am this Saturday for a work party. The purpose the the work party is to weed and tidy the park and idendify planting sites for more edibles. This is ahead of help promised by Wyre Forest District Council to establish the first raised bed in the park this month. We are looking forward to planting more fruit bushes soon and are looking for more voluinteers to help us prepare the park for the planting. Much has been going on behind the scenes since LEAP began in June. The LEAP team have met with representatives of community, local authoirity and charity organisations to raise further awareness of and interest in Let's Eat the Park. We have made some very good contacts in an ever widening network of commissioners, providers, volunteers and activists to gather a head of steam around the project. FoSGP views the partnership arrangements with WFDC parks department to establish these raised beds for LEAP as the focal point of the whole project and we will be asking our partners to help us get this underway in the very near future.
Anyone interested in helping us to develop the LEAP community growing project would be very welcome at our meeting at the Co-op Children's Centre on Friday 5 September at 7pm (please see Latest News page for details). FoSGP Chair Carol O'Brien and our group Treasurer Rob Brown visited the birthplace of edible urban environments this week, Todmorden in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. Todmorden is the birthplace of Incredible Edible, the community food growing project that began there in 2008 and has literally blossomed ever since. Incredible Edible's slogan is "If You Eat, You're In" and we here at St George's Park friends group share that sentiment. We have been planting edibles in the park since 2011 and now have funding for further development of these activities in the Horsefair and surrounding areas. Let's Eat the Park (LEAP) owes much to the Incredible Edible so-called Propaganda Gardening project and like them we had to struggle to be fully accepted and endorsed by local authorities and other locally influential organisations in the very early days of eating St George's park back in 2011. This happily is no longer the case for Incredible Edible which was endorsed and supported by Prince Charles in 2009... and neither is it any longer true of the Friends of St George's Park project. LEAP now enjoys a very producrtive and mutually positive relationship with Wyre Forest District Council and other partners including The People's Health Trust who have invested in the project. Here are some photos taken during our visit to Todmorden that illustrate what we hope to see in the Horsefair in the not too distant future as Let's Eat the Park spreads beyond the park gates. So Let's Eat the Horsefair! 26 June 2006 FoSGP Chair Carol O'Brien visited the the Calthorpe Project in Camden, London where she met with staff and volunteers of this city garden initiative. As an ambassador for the park and also our Let's Eat the Park Project (LEAP) Carol met with the Calthorpe Children's Programme Co-ordinator Niki Barnett-Henry and several volunteers who were working in the vegetable garden. Besides being the Chair of FoSGP Carol is also the lead organiser of the St George's Park KidsFest which is part of Wyre Forest District Council's Kidderminster Arts Festival (KAF) an annual arts and culture event held every August in the town. Niki was very interested in what FoSGP is doing and told Carol that she would like to visit us here in Kidderminster and of course FoSGP would warmly welcome her and every opportunity that arises to build upon our relationship with The Calthorpe Project. A guiding light for all community growing initiatives and green space projects as an early pioneer in community led urban cultivation and neighbourhood self reliance The Calthorpe Project is a worthy role model. At our current stage of development Calthorpe represents to LEAP an inspirational model of community development for the productive use of urban green spaces as gardens and venues for popular culture, community involvement and wellbeing. It shows just what can be done with vision, local involvement, widespread backing and sufficient political will to facilitate ventures like this in a locality. If any of those elements are missing projects will naturally be held back, although as initiatives like the Calthorpe Project prove beyond any doubt, the only indispensible characteristic for this sort of change to happen is the energy and vision of volunteers to make it happen in the the first place. In terms of sustainability the Calthorpe Project goes beyond the buzzword and it has done since it was first visioned and started on Grays Inn Road in the London Borough of Camden in 1984. Thirty years after local residents defeated plans and saved the land from being developed into offices The Calthorpe Project goes on from strength to strength and has become an inner-city oasis that is also one of the oldest community gardens in England. Back at the beginning of its journey in the 1980s the Calthorpe Project was funded entirely by Camden Council, but now that funding - in common with all public sector spending - has reduced considerably. Nowadays Calthorpe like FoSGP and the community sector in general has to seek funds from wherever we can find them. Sustainability is a more convoluted journey in 2014 than it was thirty years ago, but their development and evolution is in no short measure due to the creativity and tenacity of the 50 regular volunteers and 1500 service users that populate the place. The Calthorpe Project gardens have more than 30,000 visits per year preceding by more than two decades the currently popular vegetable tourism as exemplified by Incredible Edible's Todmorden where the term seems to have originated during the last decade. The Calthorpe management team have had to now consider income generation in ways they did not have to in the mid-1980s, they have to fill the gaps with creative solutions as do any community led organisation. As well as making the most out of hiring out its sports pitch and meeting rooms, the project is now looking to see business benefits from food grown in the community garden. The Project is receiving help from University College London students who are working on a feasibility project about setting-up a social enterprise and café using the food grown from the community garden. Almost all of these incredible achievements were written into the LEAP bid by the Friends group over a year ago. The Calthorpe Project had in that sense already been visioned in FoSGP proposals for LEAP long before Carol's visit to London. All the documents FoSGP have so far produced for LEAP share the same vision as The Calthorpe Project and other sister projects around the country including Incredible Edible in Todmorden, Lancashire, the Edible Bus Stop in London and the nationwide Project Dirt network. Collaboration and partnerships with local authorities, third sector organisations and local businesses lie at the heart of all of these projects. Just as initial funding for our own LEAP initiative has come from the Peoples Health Trust, it would now be very helpful to widen the field to other stakeholders who share our vision to transform St George's Park and the Horsefair/Greenhill areas into the sort of sustainable and resilient communities that The Calthorpe Project now represents. Niki told Carol about the latest development at Calthorpe the imminent installation of a new ecological composting/energy system in the shape of Anaerobic Digestion. On their website the Project reports its latest news below:- “We are pleased to announce that we have received planning permission to install our digester. Work is well underway converting our greenhouse into digester storage facility and a volunteer space. Next week we should be installing the solar panels that will heat the digestate (food waste) and turn it into liquid fertilizer and biogas.” http://www.calthorpeproject.org.uk/ As Carol discovered during her visit this news has now been overtaken by events and an impressive array of solar panels are now in place. All of us here at FoSGP look forward to the day when we can report that our solar driven anaerobic digester is about to reduce energy costs in our area and contribute to its environmental enrichment like the one about to be installed at The Calthorpe Project is going to do in Camden. In the meantime we look forward to extending and developing our existing networks and bringing them together in St George's Park the People's Park living up to its name on behalf of our community and all of those who contribute toward making it an even greener, healthier and happier place than it is now. Carol returns with inspiration and a generous gift of marjoram and nasturtium to drive LEAP forward with the backing and understanding of a national model of good practice in sustainable living in central London just a short walk from Kings Cross/St Pancras railway stations. For details of the principles and values that inspires The Calthorpe Project and which are shared by FoSGP please see the link below. http://www.calthorpeproject.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/aims-objectives.pdf The Friends of St George's Park (FoSGP) are pleased to announce the start of our People's Health Trust funded project, Let's Eat the Park. In many important ways this is a new departure for the Friends group, the £ 9,700 plus HealthThrive funding we have received puts St George's Park on the local wellbeing map so to speak, but it also gives a boost to the project to make the park edible that FoSGP started more than two years ago. So Let's Eat the Park - which we call LEAP for short - is both a new development and a continuation of a longstanding FoSGP project. The small group of volunteers that comprise the Friends of St George's Park have formed a LEAP management group to oversee the project which is currently funded for 24 months. This is not however the only project presently being organised by the group. We are shortly going to take delivery of a interpretation board we have collaborated in designing and it is now being created for installation in the park in the near future. We are particularly grateful for kind donations to this project from the Kidderminster and District Lions and also the Kidderminster Civic Society. The interpretation board is part of the St George's urban wildlife corridor and links the history and ecology of the park with ongoing developments like LEAP and the Kidderminster Arts Festival 2014 (KAF14) 'KidsFest'. Further to our partnership with Wyre Forest District Council Arts and Play initiatives FoSGP are for the second year opening KAF14 with a children and families community arts and culture festival KidsFest - which was highly successful last year. KidsFest 2 free arts and culture family event will be on Saturday 9 August from 12.00 until 4 pm in St George's Park - there will be performances of Nana's Jumble an interactive theatre production for children at 12.45 and again at 2.45pm - so don't miss it - the show is primarily aimed at 4-10 year olds but will charm all the family whatever age they are. Watch our Latest News page and the local press for more details on KidsFest 2. As regular visitors to our website (and to the park itself) will probably know St George's Park was given to the people of Kidderminster by the local 'carpet families' in 1927 and that is why we call it The People's Park. Its town centre location makes it an ideal venue for the Arts Festival and the green jewel in the crown of the Horsefair. The guiding purpose of the Let's Eat the Park project is to take the park beyond the present gates and into the community with pocket parks in the area surrounding St George's Park and up to Baxter Gardens Park including St George's churchyard.. We are discussing these plans to make the Horsefair a greener, healthier and happier place to be with our partners Wyre Forest District Council and our supporters at St George's Church, Kidderminster Transition Town and the Co-op Childcare Centre who host our monthly meetings and whose collaboration is much appreciated by the Friends group. FoSGP will be discussing the use of others pockets of unproductive land in the area to become pocket parks growing fruit and vegetables. The produce of Let's Eat the Park will go into the local food network providing nutritious food free to people harvesting it with help, support and advice from the LEAP team. Watch this space for more information. If you are interested in getting involved please contact Friends of St George's Park through the comments form here on the website or by email at [email protected]. All are welcome so please join us in taking the LEAP together into a greener more edible Horsefair. pictures with roll-over captions from work party on St George's Park edible wall 7 June 2014
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AuthorThe Friends of St George's Park is a community sector constituted group that has been in existence since 2008. Categories |