We’re into a fresh Spring season and The Glebe Community Garden is beginning to buzz with life again!
There’s been a lot happening here since our last post back at the end of February. We’ve had a change of staff in our Keith Grow Team, with Theo leaving earlier this year. Thanks for all your efforts in support of the garden and the community, Theo!
We’re delighted to announce that Katie has recently been appointed into the vacant Community Gardener role, having shared her valued support and expertise with REAP since the start of the Glebe Garden project in August last year. Welcome to the team, Katie: we’re looking forward to growing the garden with you!
In other good news, REAP has been awarded funding to support the garden project to run for the year ahead, and we’re busy behind the scenes with planning even more community outreach, local connections and improvements for the space. More news on that soon.
In the Glebe Garden itself, we’ve been appreciating the warmer weather, and enjoying more time in nature again after long winter months. We’ve had many generous donations of plants and flowers from our participants, including crowns of heritage rhubarb, blackberry plants, some lovely wee ‘tete-a-tete’ daffodils, and assorted flower bulbs, which we are gradually finding homes for. Huge thanks to everyone who’s helping to make the garden even more beautiful and bountiful!
We’ve appreciated our local library links recently, and have visited the Keith branch to collect some seed tatties and pea seeds. This is part of a seed sharing initiative by One Seed Forward, a fantastic organisation distributing free seeds through libraries across Moray and Aberdeenshire, as well as running many other excellent projects to help people get into growing their own! We’ve worked hard as a team to dig a new bed for around 50 seed potatos in the garden over the past few weeks, and look forward to harvesting and sharing those later in the year!
In other community-connected news, Georgia (that’s me!) has visited the Tuesday Table at Keith North Church twice over the past couple of months: first to present a talk about our community gardening project to members of the church guild, and then to set up a bustling stall to share a recent donation of seeds with the Tuesday Table visitors, alongside REAP’s Energy Team who were able to offer advice and resources to support people to save money on their energy bills and combat fuel crisis. We gave away over 100 packets of free seeds, and lots of people learned more about the supportive opportunities our charity offers within the local community.
We’ve also had a visit from Dena at Keith Community Radio in April to record a segment featuring the Glebe Community Garden for her show “Down the Garden Path“, airing on Tuesday 5th May, at 8.30pm, and repeated the next day, on Wednesday 6th May at 12.30-1pm. Presenter Dena sends her thanks to all for being part of the show! See Our upcoming Shows on Keith Community Radio – KCR.FM to listen in.
We’ve built a small ‘Stumpery’ bed out of logs left on site, which we’ve planted with strawberries and herbs. We intend to cultivate this as a sharing space where people in the community can help themselves to a fair share of the harvests; you might pick a sprig of parsley to add to your dinner, or a few stalks of rhubarb for a tasty crumble! Keep a look out for signage which will help guide people to pick respectfully once plants are well established.
We’ve focused on improving some other structural elements of the garden too, moving the raised beds to the sunnier side of the space to maximise hours of daylight for growing plants, and to allow vehicle access for some future projects in the pipeline.
If you’re interested to find out more about what we’re doing at the Community Garden, follow us on Facebook at The Glebe Community Garden, or pop by the office for a chat on a Monday or Tuesday. We welcome you to have a look in our newly refreshed office window at 177 Mid Street, Keith, where we’ll be promoting even more events and activities over the summer soon.
Happy gardening!