July Update

July brings with it strange weather, from pouring showers of rain to the sun beating down for days on end. It's been a few months since we gave an update so here we go. Today (13/07/2021) my sons and I (above) headed out to the garden to get some much-needed jobs done. I decided to print some nature detectives activities for the boys to do which you can find here and here if you so desire.

This month we started the construction of our new Polycrub, which is a hybrid type of polytunnel all the way from Shetland. We spent a weekend out at the garden with many members of the community out helping us getting the post holes dug, but the ground was variable and some areas fine to dig, other areas were very rocky and hard to dig, so it took a whole weekend just to get the holes started, some are still not even finished. We hope to get the polycrub finished by the end of summer and ready for the new year. Check out some amazing completed polycrubs on the polycrub website here.

Scotmid kindly came out and donated us some refreshments for the day, thanks so much Scotmid.

We also were successful in the Scotmid Community Connect Award where we won a share of £25,000, giving us an amazing £8,500 towards the cost of a community building for the garden. Watch the video here. You can see below some examples of other community gardens in the city that have a community building to get an idea of what we might be looking to install on-site.

So today I was out getting on with some much-needed weeding. The beds we planted with onion sets were totally overtaken by weeds, with all the onions gone (not sure where) but I have covered these over so that we can keep the beds hot and the weeds down until we mulch them again with some fresh compost and get them planted up. See below the before, after and then bed covered.

We have some great signs of growth (other than weeds!!) in the garden with the potatoes coming on, parsnips, beetroot, onions, leaks and the brassicas. The brassicas are challenging as birds eat them as well as they are known for bugs eating them so we really need to plan these better next year, maybe even keep them in the polycrub, but they are coming on.

We have also started a weekly volunteer session, so the plan is to be out every Saturday between 11 and 1pm so that folk can come along and get involved and ask questions, find out what we are upto and our goals. Although this has been slow, it's been great to have some routine and get some presence out in the garden.

We have some upcoming events, so we are looking to have a potato harvest event when the potatoes are ready, so watch this space. We also plan on having another tree planting event, with our last one being a great success. We had a donation of some oak and chestnut trees from a local so I am going to keep hold of these until the best time to plant trees, which is autumn/winter time. We hope to get a donation of some extra trees from the Dundee countryside rangers also, who will lead the event, so watch this space and keep an eye out on Facebook for these events.

Some potatoes I dug up while weeding.