Westcott Community Garden
Our first project was born out of consultation with the local community at Westfest 2021 – a community garden was the most voted for project and subsequently, after several false starts, in 2022 we were fortunate to be given the opportunity to create Westcott Community Garden at St John’s.
Community Garden Ethos and Principles:
- Manage the garden in a sustainable way by locally resourcing!
- Be a welcoming place, to encourage visitors & volunteers to come – open to all.
- Embrace diversity of body; thought and opinions.
- Working in harmony with nature and one another to build a safe place to relax.
- Using an attitude of honesty and trust to build community with shared ownership and responsibility.
- To learn from each other and educate in all aspects of horticulture, developing specific skills in soil management.
- Improve local resilience and bring the community together by learning skills, how to grow our own food; fruit, flowers and vegetables.
Our first year
Following community meetings to garner interest, volunteers started work on preparing the plot (on an area which churchyard plans show there are no graves) in January 2023. From the start we decided that we would adopt the ‘no dig’ approach, advocated by Charles Dowding.
The first stage, on a cold and wet January Saturday afternoon, was to cover the area with cardboard and add a layer of horse manure.
Next it was time to construct some raised beds…
Compost bins…
and shift a huge pile of woodchips!
Lots of helpful volunteers turned up to paint the fence around the seating area…
Finally we were ready to fill the beds with soil, gleaned from neighbours near and far and begin planting up the seeds that volunteers had been nurturing at home in preparation!
The kind donation of many waterbutts means that we can save rainwater for watering the garden when needed (we now have even more!).
Tea & cake are an essential part of volunteer’s Saturday mornings!
Just a snapshot of the produce grown and harvested in our first year…
