Author Archives: GM

Our food-growing club at the Bridge has been harvesting – and we had lots of young helpers. We’ve pulled up delicious radishes, as well as courgettes (some of which have started a new life as delicious courgette chutney) from our new raised beds, which were built back in the sweltering summer with the goodwill and serious physical effort of volunteers.

In other exciting grub news, our partners at Avant Gardening have won a grant to find fun ways to get kids even more engaged with food and growing – including vegetable ice cream! Watch this space for more details.

If you can help with planning, planting and other green-fingered activities, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at thebridgese10@gmail.com

Put the date in your diary: We’ll be holding our Christmas bash in the Pleasaunce on 8th December. Expect  carols from the Halstow Community Choir, festive stalls, nearly-new toys for sale, hot refreshments including mulled wine, and a grotto, with the man himself making his now traditional unconventional entrance. What will he be riding this year?

If you would like to have a table / stall, please email thebridgese10@gmail.com for more information

We have to add an extra thank you to the earlier post – to Clinton and Jeremy, heroic spaders, shovellers, barrowers and hammerers, who worked until after sunset last night shifting a huge pile of topsoil from one end of the site to the other, and into the new beds. We’re almost ready to plant, as soon as we lay our hands on some additional compost to dig in. Thanks, all!

Volunteers from the Bridge and Pip! endured sweltering sun this week while constructing wooden raised beds to get our food-growing club running.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the dowel-bashing, malleting, gluing, hefting, carrying, perspiring and general collective problem-solving and instruction-interpreting. And thanks to Stephen Brain, for collecting the evidence of the hard work on camera. Thanks also to those who turned up on the first scheduled day when the delivery of the blocks meant we had to postpone. And huge thanks also for Sue Gay’s time and effort bringing gravel, horticultural fabric and compost today – a huge task.

The ‘Wood Blocx’ system under construction

Exhausted, but job done. Clinton, Gavin, Adam and Liz take a deserved rest. Thanks also to Jacqui, who had to leave before the mugshots

The materials for the beds were donated by Mace, the contractors building the new Greenwich Square development – and we were really pleased with how attractive they turned out to be. They’ve already made a big difference to what was a derelict-looking patch of hardstanding – and once the beds are sprouting and blooming it’s sure to be really beautiful.

We aim to use the beds to help the children (and grown-ups) who come to the Bridge’s play-and-stay sessions to learn about food-growing and healthy eating and to excite them about trying vegetables and fruit that they might otherwise turn their noses up at. Growing your own food can have a great effect on children’s willingness to try new flavours.

If you weren’t able to be there, there are still ways you can help – there is a list of materials that would really help to launch our kids’ growing club – scroll to the bottom of this earlier post to see if there’s anything that you might be able to donate, including food-growing knowledge.

We were also really pleased to be approached by Paul and Nala from Avant Gardening this week, who are looking for partners for their plans to get people in Greenwich excited about food – ideas include flavouring ice cream with wacky vegetable flavours and riding a cycle-powered ice cream maker around the area, among other brilliant ideas. Next they’ll be applying for funding to make their plans a reality, and we hope to be involved. Watch this space.

There will be a free zumba class in the Pleasaunce this Friday at 5pm – along with all of the other last-day-of-term excitement, including the cafe’s swishing event in aid of Oxfam. Click for more details of the zumba.

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

Pip! volunteers water the fruit trees in our young orchard every week in the warmer months. On 4 August at around 10.30am we’ll get together to set the rota for the following month or so.

If you’d like to get involved in this way, we’d love to see you – we’ll be the ones with the watering cans on site from 10am. At 10.30am we’ll have a cup of coffee in the cafe, have a chat and get our diaries out. Please feel free to join us, we’re a friendly and informal bunch.

In the meantime, you can just turn up to meet us and help out if you feel like it, as we’ll be watering from 10am every Sunday morning in July. If you want to double-check what days we’re watering, go to our Facebook group and check the posts there. If you join our Facebook group, too, our posts should appear in your timeline and keep you up to date with events, news and volunteering opportunities.