Transition Town Tooting

Tag: Growing

  • Pollinator Paths Wandsworth project day: the sun shone on a busy garden scene

    We had a fun, busy and instructive Sunday afternoon meeting the local participants in the Pollinator Paths Wandsworth project, and welcoming visitors who found us because we joined in with the Chelsea Fringe and Wandsworth Arts Fringe.

    Getting the new planter home

    People told us they appreciated being able to have a detailed and friendly conversation about how to look after and enjoy the plants they took home to their balcony, patio or garden: thank you Martin & Jo!

    Tooting Community Garden was the fourth of the local gardens to host their event when we share advice and plants. Next steps include a series of seasonal workshops on topics such as composting and making insect habitats. In autumn 2017 there are next spring’s bulbs to plant – and the garden and pollination year will come round again!

    The community garden’s 6th birthday cake

    Conversations with new and old friends, exploring the space and doing new things outdoors were great parts of the day.
    More news when we have it on events that everyone can join alongside the project participants. The PPW project facebook page is here.

    Finishing line of the caterpillar race. We’ll run it again!

  • Pollinator Paths workshops and the Community Garden’s 6th Birthday: Sunday 21st May 12 – 4pm

    On Sunday the Tooting participants in the Pollinator Paths Wandsworth project are collecting their plants to grow on during 2017. 
    Come to the Community Garden at 5 North Road, SW16 1RN between 12:00 midday and 4:00 pm.

    Some of the beautiful plants that project participants can grow on at home

    We’ll advise you on how to plant and look after them, and you can enjoy them all year as well as looking out for the beneficial insects that should be attracted to your balcony, patio or garden. For more info, click here – and everyone can follow progress and join in on facebook.

    We’ve had our first card!

    Plus, on the same afternoon everyone is welcome to the Tooting Community Garden’s 6th Birthday!
    We’ll start celebrating at 3:00 with the caterpillar race (find your food plant!) and
    we’ll cut the birthday cake at 3:30.

    Caterpillar costumes – choose your style
    Food plants our caterpillars race for

    Some caterpillars are very camouflaged, and some are very conspicuous – which kind will you be?

    All welcome on Sunday!

  • Tooting Pollinator Party Sunday 21st May!

    We’d like to welcome everyone to the Tooting Community Garden on Sunday 21st May from 12:00 to 4:00 for our free Pollinator Party!
    Find us at 5 North Drive, SW16 1RN.

    What’s a Pollinator Party?
    It’s a lovely afternoon in the garden. We’re mixing together fun and instructive activities that focus on planting, beneficial insects and sharing our own growing experience of city gardening, Tooting style. 

     
    What’s good for our gardens and insects is also good for us!

    What can you come and do on the 21st?

    • We’ll celebrate the Community Garden’s 6th birthday with games, volcano kettle tea – and a cake. 
    • We’ll offer practical do-it-yourself making opportunities – creating cloches from plastic bottles and inventing wall planters from textile and plywood for strawberries or herbs.
    • We’ll have quizzes and activities about insects and pollination – and Lola Godoy’s geodesic dome to enjoy as a special habitat during the afternoon.
    • We’ll have a rolling workshop to distribute plants to the local people who have already signed up to join in with the Pollinator Paths Wandsworth project. Developed with London Sustainability Exchange, in this project 4 borough community gardens are each involving local gardeners (novices too) who will grow insect-friendly plants throughout 2017 on balconies, patios, at school, in the street and in back gardens. Over 60 local gardeners will share what they see, learn, enjoy and taste.
    • Feel free to relax, bring a picnic (we’re an alcohol-free site) – and of course do some gardening if you like.

     

     

    Timetable:
    We’ll run all the activities throughout the afternoon – and we’ll stop for tea together and blow out the candles on the cake at 3:30 pm.

    We’re very pleased that the day is part of both the Wandsworth Arts Fringe and the Chelsea Fringe: both full of other great events.

    We want this project, and all our community garden sessions, to help inspire new links, share skills and spark growing in lots of diverse settings across the whole borough.

    Lola and her dome will be with us on the 21st!
    Where are the Pollinator Paths project plants coming from?
    Almost all of them have been grown in Tooting by our friends at Share in their lovely garden tucked away in Springfield Hospital. Perennial plants and bulbs have been ordered in. The result is high quality and very low ‘plant miles’, a great sustainability feature of the project.
    Nasturtium & lemon lavender
    Bare-rooted red currants
    Please email us if you have any queries about the Pollinator Party or the ‘PPW’ project.

    Join in the Pollinator Paths Wandsworth facebook page to keep in touch with the project, and read the project description here.
    And finally, here’s the first post (for April) in the series that will continue telling the project story throughout 2017.

    How to carry a planter home

  • Gardens of Refuge project. April ’17 update on vertical strawberries and a watery ceiling mural

    We’re continuing to facilitate workshops as part of the Gardens of Refuge project with refugees and asylum-seekers who use the local services of CARAS in Tooting.

    This is the project for which our partnership won funding from Aviva – via the public voting so many people joined last autumn.

    The emphasis of Gardens of Refuge is on creating therapeutic experiences where participants feel happy and safe to explore imaginative activities together.

    We’re working alongide the CARAS team and volunteers with two groups:

    • with the Saturday Youth Club (mostly unaccompanied teenagers) 
    • and with Family Activity Days (adults and children in half terms and school holidays)

    Here’s the story from Gardens of Refuge in March and April:


    Saturday Youth Club: our sessions take place alongside a whole range of other social and learning activities at the youth club. Success is when groups and individuals come and join in for some or all of the time, because they want to, and try out new things as well as building on what we all did together in ’15 & ’16 in ‘Rooting in Tooting’.
     

    In the 24th March and 1st April sessions the Club has built two pallet-planters and painted them ready for planting up.

    Below right, one of last year’s flourishing planters.

    We’ve also made a new vertical strawberry planter of textile (a theatre blackout curtain from the Scrapstore). Young people problem-solved how to make the planter, folding, tucking and stapling the heavy cloth onto a big piece of plywood (part of the old Community Garden fence…). 

    They planted it up with strawberries (these same plants were growing at CARAS in 2016 and overwintered in the Community Garden). The pallet planters and this strawberry wall are all at the entrance to the CARAS office, and the idea is for the benefits to be enjoyed by passers-by and visitors alike – a real Garden of Refuge in busy urban Tooting.

    April Family Activity Day: After our growing-based Day in February, we’re continuing to link family activities with our plans to offer sessions later in ’17 in the Community Garden.

    Our idea is to create a collaborative mural for the ‘ceiling’ of the rainwater harvesting roof in the Community Garden.
     It’s an exciting open-air space and the mural’s theme will be ‘Water’.

    That gives huge scope for decoration, pictures, ideas, celebration, story telling and sharing.  
    Water is life-giving for us all and for what we grow. Water is rich with diverse meanings worldwide.

    The rainwater harvesting roof built with Gatton School in ’13. Soon to have a ceiling mural!

    On Tuesday 11 April we made a start by immersing ourselves in ideas and images and different materials – there are so many threads to follow up.

    Thanks for these FAD photos, Nikki!

    The next session is in May, and we can’t wait…

    Another benefit is that the project is attracting new volunteers who have added their energy and diverse experience – so our whole group is learning together en route. Thanks to all the volunteer team & for your co-ordination, Dermot and Jeni! 

    We welcome contacts from others who would like to be involved, or who have ideas and resources to contribute.
    Please contact us by emailing TTT here.

    Yum! The crop in 2016’s textile planter

     – Charles

  • Gardens of Refuge project – February 2017 monthly update as we start with a Family Activity Day

    After the long haul of communicating near and far for voting in the Aviva Community Fund last year, winning funding in January, and getting on with the planning for 2017…we’ve begun the project!

    Our first session with the CARAS refugee and asylum-seekers has been a Family Activity Day on Valentine’s Day..
    It was a familiar mother-and-children event like many repeated all across Britain when it’s half term, and that everyday normalness was exactly the point: creating a safe and friendly space for some fun and practical family time together as a community.
    That’s the purpose of Gardens of Refuge: to create with asylum-seekers and refugees a therapeutic sense of wellbeing and feeling at home, plus growing activities and meeting members of the wider local community.

    Run by CARAS staff and volunteers, plus more from TTT, by 11:30 the church hall at All Saints Tooting was transformed with friendly faces and drop-in games and toys for all ages.

    Egle from CARAS ran a 90-minute programme while lunch was being prepared:

    • In a circle of chairs: welcome, introductions & ground rules for inclusion and safety.
    • In a big burst of energy – playing ‘fruit salad’ to get us all interacting, adults and children alike.
    • At 3 tables: looking at images from the Tooting Community Garden and saying which kind of activities individuals would like to try out this year- gardening, picnicking & cooking on a fire; garden crafts; and enjoying nature. Everyone had 5 votes to distribute using sticky stars…results to be shared.
    • Continuing at the tables to decorate flower pots using stickers, feathers and pipe cleaners.
    Carefully writing a plant label
    • Transplanting growing pots of supermarket herbs (donated by Waitrose Balham). Each pot was divided into 5 or 6 smaller pots, so the roots of basil, parsley, coriander, and greek basil have room to grow on windowsills back at home, and so they could all be shared out between 45 people.  
    • Meanwhile lunch was being cooked by Rama, one of the Chickpea Sisters, plus Georgie and Sara from Abel & Cole (who donated fresh salad).
    • To really get an appetite, we played another active circle game: ‘change places if you are wearing stripes…’
    • Then everyone sat down together to enjoy a hot meal.
    • Departure at 2:45 was a balancing act as there were a lot of plants to carry home – some families had three buses to catch – and another time we’ll bring some extra paper bags.

      Thanks to the CARAS volunteers: Rama, Vicky, Ruby, Susan, Nadia.
      And to the TTT volunteers: Resina and her children, Rose, Georgie, Sara, Chuck and Chris from the Royal Horticultural Society. Chris helped us through 2015 and 2016 with ‘Rooting in Tooting’ our first project with CARAS, and is continuing as a mentor in 2017.

      We’re making plans for Gardens of Refuge activities both with the CARAS Women’s Group and the Youth Club. Yesterday we met the Club’s Youth Council to see how they can be involved in guiding the project. The Council is great – 8 young people from 3 countries who are gaining experience of leadership, communication and self-confidence. More on that group later.

      PS – CARAS and TTT both share other updates on our respective facebook pages and on twitter – do follow if you want to be closer to the action! And, do get in contact by email if you want to offer volunteering time or resources – or ideas – to the whole project; we’d love to hear from you.

      In the kitchen
      Our motorscootering mentor

    • TTT 2016 Gardening Celebration tonight!

      Tonight is the TTT 2016 Gardening Celebration – plus we’re looking forward to exciting things in 2017. The event is at The Selkirk near Tooting Broadway from 7:00 pm.

      To celebrate the celebration:
      here are five current growing, gardening and sustainability events and ideas to follow up even if you can’t make it tonight:

      1 TTT attended the bi-annual Wildlife Gardening Forum last week at the Natural History Museum. This is always an amazing and cross-cutting event with around 100 participants – private gardeners, schools, local authorities, biodiversity and growing charities, researchers, enterprises.

      The theme this time was learning from European experience in Germany, Belgium, Austria the Netherlands, Ireland (oh, and Scotland).
      Why learn from Europe? Click on the photo…

      We learned a German word – schwammstadt  – meaning ‘sponge city’. A sponge city is redesigned to be responsive and adaptive to climate change impact and allow for more natural rainfall retention, reducing runoff. (See the event on December 8th in para 4 below).
      Anyone can attend the Forum; it’s a great day when you can meet experts and work out what ideas you can use yourself. And all the presentations appear for free on the WLGF website in due course.

      2 TTT joined Capital Growth’s ‘Roots to Growth’ workshop.
      We looked at the experience and potential of farming as an enterprise within London.

      There’s tons of good info on the Capital Growth site – all these reports are free downloads.

      While the pleasure and impact of growing together is not only about saving money and managing our budgets, what do you think is the annual value of the crops grown by 2000 London gardens linked to Capital Growth? Include crops for sharing, not only veg which are sold, so you can include Tooting Community Garden’s pumpkins in the calculation. Have a guess – the answer is at the end of this blog.
      We could take up the challenge of recording our crops – see the Harvest-ometer from Sustain.  
      This kind of data is very valuable in order to be able to make our case for more growing in London!
      TTT’s friend Mark at Vertical Veg has documented the equivalent value of what he grows – click here to read about it.

      Plus here’s a great idea: three new projects each pitched their idea for two minutes – and we voted during the day so that one project won £50, one £100 and one £150.
      You really can make your point in two minutes – it was very impressive!

      3 We hosted a meeting with the RHS
      The Royal Horticultural Society supported our 2015-16 Rooting in Tooting project via their Greening Grey Britain campaign. Ten days ago we met Brid O’Dwyer from the RHS for a ‘walk and talk’ around Tooting to discuss our own experience of urban growing and what gardens like ours look for in terms of support. At the same time the RHS is refining its own approaches to supporting community projects. We had a short chat with Sarah Bailes at Share Community gardens in Springfield Hospital:

      There the conversation included making the RHS certification schemes accessible to a wider audience, for example people with a range of learning difficulties.

      4 Looking forward, TTT is a partner in a 2017 hot-composting project originated by our friend Martin (who ran most of Growing Tooting earlier this year). This project has received support from Wandsworth Borough Council, and will ask individuals, families and schools to compare experience of using hot composting bins. Please contact TTT for information.

      5 Also looking forwards, on 8th December Joanna Ecclestone from London Wildlife Trust will be speaking at the Wandsworth Environment Forum about the benefits of replacing areas of paving with planting to create rain gardens. Free to join in, details here.

      Early in 2016 TTT also helped build a green roof at Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses, a project funded from the London Wildlife Trust. Green roofs have exactly that purpose of allowing downpours to slow down and soak into soil rather than being trapped by paving. That’s urgent, and not just a ‘nice to do’ in areas prone to flooding.
      Plus on December 8th there will a special TTT prize for anyone who uses the word schwammstadt.

      Good Growing and enjoy the celebration this evening!
      PS the value of crops grown in London in spaces linked to Capital Growth is over £2 million – see the Reaping Rewards report

    • ‘Gardens of Refuge’: our new partnership project for 2017 with CARAS & The Grange. Vote for funding online through the Aviva Community Fund!

      “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” (Audrey Hepburn)

      We are thrilled that Gardens of Refuge, our new partnership project plan has reached the final public voting stage of the Aviva Community Fund! The project is centred on the refugee and asylum-seeker community who are supported by the Tooting charity CARAS.

      Read the description of the project online here.

      For the future: bulbs for 2017

      Gardens of Refuge is listed under ‘CARAS’ on the Aviva Community Fund website.
      You’ll see that the project is all about growing the therapeutic benefits of gardening plus greening the community we share in Tooting.  
      And it’s about building ways to enable refugees to share their knowledge and skills locally to imagine and create a more beautiful neighbourhood as a legacy for all.

      Legacy: flourishing from 2015’s cuttings
      There are three partners in Gardens of Refuge:

      CARAS – with whom we have worked in depth for 18 months  on Rooting in Tooting.

      The Grange – a residential respite and permaculture centre in Norfolk who work with CARAS. Please see The Grange.

      & Transition Town Tooting

      As of today, the website is live for the public to vote for the projects they would like Aviva to support. 
      Voting is open until 18th November: but please don’t delay!
      Please vote and encourage Aviva to support Gardens of Refuge!  

      You have to register individually before you can vote: to register, please click here for the Aviva webpage
      Then search for CARAS or Gardens of Refuge to vote!

      Thank you so much for your support, 
      and please contact us by email if you have any queries.

    • Growing together, Learning together, Working together: three years of Outdoor Learning in Gatton Primary School’s own words

      Early in May we held a delightful celebration of three years’ shared experience of the outdoor learning project between Gatton Primary School and Tooting Community Garden. 
      You can look at that blog report by clicking here. 

      The sun shone on us all and lit the mosaic made at the school with every pupil involved. 
      Among the natural images the tiles spell out the three phrases that are the title of this post.

      What is outdoor learning? ‘OL’ covers many activities (not only gardening) and settings. OL offers opportunities for surprising and diverse impact on participants –not fixed or one-size–fits–all.

      Have a look at this earlier TTT post on outdoor learning with younger children from Gatton School.
      Also, click on OUTDOOR LEARNING in the Quick LInks at the top of this web page for stories from 3 years of the project.

      We want to share Gatton School pupils’ own words about their experience of the project. Young people from Year Six (10 & 11 years old) made confident and touching short speeches at the celebration, and you can read the texts here. 


       All the statements are fascinating, and I’ll quote just parts of what 4 different pupils said:

      • “For over three years now our school has worked as a team to create these projects which you see before you. Team work is necessary in our lives and Gatton School has used this advantage to work as a team and benefit the environment”
      • “We can cultivate land together and learn more social skills when we are engrossed in doing gardening together as either a family or as a community”
      • “Taking part in such activities even improves our Design & Technology skills and encourages children to do something that benefits them as well as having fun doing so. D&T inspires children’s creativity and pushes them to think about important ways to support Mother Nature” 
      •  “Nature plays an important part in every religion and it is everyone’s responsibility to take care of it. We strongly believe that this community garden has brought us together and closer than ever before”


      I asked Rifat Batool, Head of Gatton School, to share some of her vision for establishing and continuing the project. She said:

      “Outdoor and engaging learning is a strong aspect of our work at Gatton School. The various projects carried out in the community garden over the past 3 years have allowed pupils to see first-hand how much we can do together as part of a strong partnership committed to learning. 

      We continually challenge our thinking and way of learning to drive for more innovative ideas to enhance learning even further. This allows pupils to see that so much is possible when using creativity, imagination and sense of purpose. 

      This partnership and celebration represents the coming together of people from different backgrounds and interests  and is an amazing representation of teamwork, collaboration and mutual respect”.

      TTT feels honoured to be part of three years of positive experiment, and grateful for the commitment shown by the children, Gatton School staff, Mushkil Aasaan the owners of the garden site and our own team, rain or shine.

       
      Thank you all, and we’re looking forward to the next three years!
      – Charles

    • Tooting Foodival Wins Mayor’s Sunshine Award

      Tooting Foodival 2015 today received an inaugural Grow Wandsworth Award from Mayor of Wandsworth, Nicola Nardelli, who launched the awards to encourage people and organisations who grow healthy, fresh, local food in Community Food Projects.

      With Mayor Nicola at Wandsworth Town Hall

      At a reception in the Mayor’s Parlour at the Town Hall, including very beautiful cakes, Foodival won the “Sunshine Award” for “celebrating the ways people have brought a bit of sunshine into the lives of others through community growing”! We do our best!

      Back in September the Mayor experienced the myriad food related activities Samaj Hall, including some prize winning vegetables and bananas (below)!

      Mayor Nicola Nardelli with David & Mal at Foodival 2015

      We are delighted to receive this award and it was really interesting to meet people from the other award-winning community groups including friends from SHARE Community and Wendelsworth Community Garden as well as new contacts who we hope to collaborate with in the future.

      For anyone interested in getting involved in Foodival 2016, the first planning meeting will be at the King’s Head in Upper Tooting Road, Tooting Bec, on this Thursday evening (Feb 4th) at 7pm.  All welcome to help us work out how we will create this year’s home grown sustainable food festival in Tooting.  If you have any ideas, skills, or just fancy being part of a fantastic (and now award-winning!) community project please do come along.

    • Growing Tooting

      TTT is delighted to launch Growing Tooting, a new project to promote community gardening in Tooting and nearby neighbourhoods. This is a year-long project which aims to attract more people into growing healthy local food.

      You may be familiar with some of the benefits of community growing, for instance:

      • Socialising with a shared interest 
      • Improving your health via gentle physical exercise and eating fresh, highly nutritious fruit and veg 
      • Helping the environment by reducing food miles 

      Whether you are completely new to growing fruit and veg, or whether you are an experienced gardener wanting to develop your growing skills, this project can help you. Having a garden isn’t necessary: we can also give you ideas about growing on a windowsill, windowbox or balcony. If you’re a school, community group or club, or a local enterprise and you’d like to set up a growing space or develop an existing one, we can help too, with ideas about crops, composting, encouraging wildlife, etc.

      In the coming months we’ll be holding a number of community events, so please follow the Growing Tooting posts on this site. In the meantime, if you’d like to contact the project: call Martin on 07980 095 152 or EMAIL US

      We are very grateful to Wandsworth Borough Council Big Society Fund for their support of this project.