Hopefully, you will have seen Carey’s blog about the fantastic outreach work she is doing with the Belhaven Green Team, the Beehive Garden Buddies and soon, the Belhaven hospital Buddies. We also employ Una who manages the Brewery’s Secret Garden. All this work could not take place without funding to pay sessional wages, tools, insurance and core costs for Sustaining Dunbar. Our thanks goes to: Belhaven Brewery for sponsoring us; Dunbar and East Linton Area Partnership for their support; The Robertson Trust; The Amos Trust and lastly, to two Grammar school pupils who won the Youth Philanthropy Award on behalf of the Belhaven Community Garden. Arno and Lukas won a national competition for their presentation on the benefits of gardening on mental health and this will go towards helping to reduce the social isolation of Belhaven’s nursing home residents in the New Year.
What does it take to make a garden grow? I think my answer to this is many, many volunteering hours, a good plan and great compost. We have a really fantastic group of volunteers who turn their hands to all types of gardening and have brought such life, joy and abundance to the garden this year. Some volunteers come along every week, come rain or shine, and others turn up when they can in amongst all their other commitments. This year, we’ve also got three new Grammar school volunteers who are working towards the The Duke of Edinburgh Award. In addition to our regular Saturday volunteer sessions (2-4pm, if you’re thinking of joining us), I started a Wednesday morning group (9-12) initially to help get the soft fruit and apple harvest in and this is working well for those who can’t make the weekends.
The steering group has been working on the good plan. This coming year, we’ve worked out a crop rotation for seven communal plots to go in this order: legumes, brassicas, potatoes, alliums, sweetcorn, wheat, and squash. We’re testing out growing phacelia, fava beans and white clover as green manure on a couple of these plots which will be turned into the soil before the next crop. The volunteers who help prepare the ground, sow, water and weed and harvest will get first choice of the crops. We distribute the harvest at the end of the volunteer sessions. This year, the harvest kept on going for months: early potatoes, early fruit; then raspberries, heaps of courgettes, tomatoes, apples, beans galore, great cucumbers.. you get the idea. However, the fruit harvest is a bit different. The soft fruit is picked by all the keen jam makers but this year the redcurrant and blackcurrant bushes were dripping fruit so we picked and froze about 18kgs. That led to a communal jam and chutney making session in November in the brand new kitchen at Belhaven Church Hall - our blackcurrant jam and redcurrant and rosemary chutney is now for sale at the Crunchy Carrot.
We had lots of extra help to bring in the apple harvest too - cubs, beavers, The Rural Skills group, as well as lots and lots of Saturday and Wednesday volunteer sessions. The harvest was a good one, like last year, and the crop was distributed amongst all the pickers as well as Dunbar Food Share and we sold 237kg to the Crunchy Carrot. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to host our Apple Day this year due to problems at the hospital with contaminated water, but it’s in the diary for 2023. We also experimented with storing some of the Meridian and Sunset apples in the garage to see if we could extend the season by a few months. This was only partly successful: it was such a warm autumn, that even our cold garage couldn’t stop them turning.
And the third key element to make a garden grow is the great compost. We built 4 massive compost heaps in April and filled two of them to the brim straight away. The idea here was to create the conditions for a hot compost with a critical mass of mixed organic material. It was very satisfying to watch it cook down very quickly during the hot summer, producing some really excellent compost and some rougher mulch that we then used on the communal beds. It certainly helped to have Dunbar Grammar school’s chicken manure in the mix.
May 2022 - The Seedling Swap brought lots of people to the garden looking for new varieties to grow and bringing us the extra plants they’d grown from seed. We raised some funds for the garden at the same time.
Here, the Crown Prince squash seedlings are going into the ground, June 2022. These did really well and provided us with the main course at our 10th anniversary ceilidh in November.
This is a photo of one of the two bee swarms caught in early summer 2022. One of them was rehoused in a nearby hive in the garden and the other was picked up and taken to North Berwick.
Crystal, a student of Landscape and Design at Edinburgh University, volunteered with us in the spring and summer whilst conducting ‘garden-along-interviews’ for her dissertation which you can read here: Crystal’s dissertation.
