Seedy Saturday is an event that Calder Foodhub has been running for a few years now – encouraging people to bring along spare seeds and plants and taking away other people’s surplus seeds.

We held our Seedy Saturday event this year at Redacre Community Growing Project – a former waste ground site converted to organic allotments for local people. Holding the event there meant that people could come down and hang around for a while, enjoying the sunshine and the delicious food. (more…)

April has been a busy month in the gardens as spring has finally arrived. All hands have been on deck as we have been able to start planting in the beds. From the start of April, the first early potatoes were sown and, four weeks later we have just finished planting our main crop too so thank you to everyone who has helped. Natures Play Nursery children have been a great help along side our regular volunteers and Cyrenians Hospitality Students. (more…)

We’ve been getting steadily busier through April, receiving 383 donations of bikes. Soon it will be time to recruit more mechanics to boost the number of bikes we can get back onto Edinburgh’s roads and cycle paths over the summer. Refurbished bikes are sold at our workshop Tuesday to Saturday, 10am – 5pm. All come with a 3 month warranty and are as affordable as we can make them! Customers come from near and far, although the couple in the picture certainly travelled further than anyone else. After flying from Australia, they touched down in Edinburgh and made us their first port of call. Arriving on foot with all their bags they left us with bikes, pannier racks, maps and best wishes for their adventures! (more…)

The Howden Clough Farm shop is now open two days a week Tuesday & Thursday lunch and this should carry on for several weeks for the early season vegatable plants.

The in house interest and sales have been relatively good. We have been able to develop and maintain interest both to the farm and shop activity with the year 7 group of students and that is of great encouragement to me.

The chickens are producing more eggs with the daylight hours on the increase. (more…)

Hello, and welcome to our latest update from the jungle in Ecuador!

We were delighted to have Jennie Burns join us on the land this month and below is her report on her time spent with us. Thank you so much for your patience, good humour and expertise.

For our part, we continue to work on the land – we have marked out and cleared around the pathway to be constructed leading into the Centre and to the site of the proposed water supply. (more…)

April at Rhubarb Farm has been catch-up time. As the weather improved we have been madly doing ground preparation, sowing, transplanting and getting veg into the ground. We have had an increasing number of volunteers and now have about 30 regulars per week. Everyone who comes, no matter what their needs are, is contributing economically to the social enterprise, and this is a valuable aspect of our work – people excluded or long-term out of the job market are able to play a part in the local economy, and get support themselves. (more…)

March has been the first month that Rhys and I have been in the gardens and what an incredible place to be! We have also been lucky enough to welcome new volunteers Simon, Simone and Sabrina to the team. There are already so many wonderful volunteers who dedicate their time and energy to make the gardens the lovely, peaceful place it is: it has been a real joy to meet you all and we look forward to growing with you over the coming months. (more…)

April has seen new classes starting in Galashiels at the Hive. New children’s song time and Mucky Pup Messy Play have started up every Thursday. As a lovely practice session class tutor Carolyn lead the clients at Hive in a messy play. These are all adult with learning disabilities and it was enormous fun and a treat for all. Diane Walker, is starting a new class with young, unemployed adults teaching them the craft of furniture restoration. Diane is also mentoring the participants in buying and selling furniture once the work is complete. we hope to expand this as an alternative to education later in the year.

This months pictures are some work from Diane to promote her class. We have adopted this as the logo for our Awards for All programme.

Last month our first electric cars arrived, to be used by two communities as shared vehicles. The cars allow fewer surplus cars, and more access to a car for less money. The booking system also encourages lift-sharing which is another big step to greener motoring.

Electric cars are truly green if they are well made and powered by renewables, and surplus renewable output most of the time. Ours are powered mainly by renewables either directly from our PV and wind turbine or indirectly through a green electricity supplier. We are leasing Nissan Leafs, the project is the start of a road of discovery, and is quite innovative.

Recently we’ve been having a visitor to Eco Club who’s been very interested in our raised beds! An Urban Fox has been coming along to forage and digging up our fertile soil. Now we’re hugely supportive of local wildlife at Eco Club but in this case we really needed to defend our food before we were left with just a bed of holes. The first step was to lay down large amounts of dry cumfrey stems, which sit on top of the soil and deter Mr Fox from digging. This worked for a while but as they began to break down the Fox started again. So we decided we needed a stronger deterrent. Re-using two old trellises we laid them securely over the beds creating an impenetrable and fox-proof growing zone!