Our new children’s food growing club needs your help

The Bridge community centre and Pip! (Planting in the Pleasaunce) are getting together to create a children’s and parents’ vegetable and fruit garden in the Pleasaunce – but we need help from local people.

We want to use our raised beds ‘allotment’ to teach children at our under-5s sessions – and the grown-ups – about healthy eating and where food comes from.

We’ve got some of what we need to get started but with a very limited budget available to us, we’re appealing for help from the community to find the other important things we need to get our growing club off the ground.

We need:

• Volunteers on Monday 15 July
• Equipment, materials and seeds

If you have anything from the list below that you’re able to donate (or if you’re willing and able to donate funds towards them), please do get in touch with us, ideally well before 15 July – and thank you! You can reach us via gavinmcgregor@gmail.com.

We’re also having a volunteer day to build our beds – which will be made of wooden blocks that fit together. If you can help, come along on Monday 15 July at 12 noon to the Bridge, which is in the corner of the Pleasaunce, near the cafe. Email to say you can make it – or just turn up if you become free at the last minute. Thank you!

So here are some things we could really do with…

Equipment / materials

·         Compost (preferably peat-free and organic) – urgent!

·         Permeable horticultural plastic – urgent!

·         Gravel / small stones – urgent!

·         Gloves – children’s and adults’

·         Trowels / hand forks / hand hoes

·         Watering cans – children’s and adults’

·         Markers/labels for plants

·         Netting & net supports

·         Bamboo poles or equivalent

·         Pallets

·         Builders’ bags / hessian sacks

Seeds or plants – any of these will be great for us to plant at this time of year:

·         Peas

·         French beans

·         Oriental leaves (eg pak choi, tat soi)

·         Kohl rabi

·         Radish

·         Turnip

·         Beetroot

·         Carrots

·         Florence fennel

·         Spinach

·         Rainbow chard

·         Coriander

·         Chervil

·         Parsley

·         Rocket

·         Lettuce

·         Lamb’s lettuce

·         Land cress

·         Salad onions – winter varieties

·         Winter purslane