This October will mark the 10th anniversary of the Belhaven Community Garden and if you haven’t visited for a while, you need to head over and admire the changes. The Sensory Garden has matured beautifully, the willow and blackthorn hedges are now home to several dozen sparrow families, and the orchard trees are no longer sticks in the ground but productive medium sized fruit trees. The pear and plum blossom is just coming to an end but the apple blossom will be out in the next few weeks, and it really is stunning to see.
It’s over a year now since the new garden steering group was set up and there are now 8 of us working together including Lizzie Swarbrick, our new Events Coordinator. Lizzie is brimming full of ideas to run more events in the garden for our community so keep a look out in the SD newsletter or on the BCG Facebook group for upcoming events. Our next one is a Seedling Swap and Plant Sale on Saturday May 14th, 2-5pm - a great chance to swap the extra seedlings you don’t have space for or find a new variety of seedling you’d like to try to grow.
But first, let me bring you up to date with some of things that have happened in the garden this year already.
Back in March, two local boys got in touch to ask if they could represent the garden in the Youth Philanthropy Initiative’s competition. (See here for more info: https://ypiscotland.org.uk/) Arlo and Lukas visited the garden and interviewed lots of our volunteers while we were cleaning up the polytunnel, promising that the winner of the competition would be awarded £3,000 for their chosen project. They put together a presentation about the benefits of gardening on mental health and specifically how the BCG has managed to support people during Covid restrictions. Their task was to present to their class, and if they won that round, they would present to the school, before making the presentation at national level. That seemed like an awful lot of hoops to jump through, so we all were genuinely delighted when we got the message that they had progressed to the national level and were then finally awarded with the main prize! All credit goes to Arlo and Lukas who have sharpened their presentation skills and raised awareness of the BCG amongst their age group. This is a very unexpected windfall for our project and we are now discussing how we can best use the funds to further support people access the garden for therapeutic sessions.
We started 2022 still under Covid restrictions but with a strong urge to be outside and socialise. What better way to bring in the year than to start a new local tradition: wassailing. This is an ancient tradition borrowed from the West Country in England to bless the orchard to bring a good harvest and chase away any evil spirits lurking around. We started with wassailing songs led by members of Dunbar Sings and poems written by local poets, recited around a fierce bonfire to warm our bones. Then we processed around the orchard, stopping beside chosen trees to make as much noise as we could to chase away those bad spirits and bless the trees with this year’s apple juice and shouting ‘wassail’ at the top of our voices. Next to Beltane, this is probably the best way to connect to our ancient pagan roots and it certainly felt like we were honouring the orchard which is a place that is often overlooked.
It hasn’t all been singing, wassailing and winning money this year though. 2022 is the year of pretty big structural projects and the biggest was re-covering our polytunnel. Luckily, we have Bob who is the master of all things needing fixed, and he led up the project to assess the work, purchase the parts, and find a polytunnel expert who led the session. Our volunteers turned out in the dozens to get this work done, which took the best part of two days to complete. The day we chose to unroll the plastic was very, very wet but as there was no wind we carried on. You can see the results in the photos below.
The second of the big structural projects in the garden this year is the construction of new compost bays beside the railway line. Of course, that’s the final result which is a work in progress at the moment but the photo shows you the spot where we plan to site the bays. What you can’t see from the photo is the amount of work that went into clearing the site! Again, our volunteers have worked really hard to clear masses of old plastic, loads of accumulated junk here and at the back gate so that we have clearer access and space for deliveries of seaweed or compost.