Volunteering session & Garden Planning Workshop

Open Session for visitors and volunteers, all welcome! 

Drop in Garden Planning Workshop - Saturday 19th October - 12.00-4.00pm

The Proposal
In February this year we posted our plans to redevelop the grow space around the Polytunnel. There were a number of reasons for this project, initially to help cultivate the soil, improve drainage and water retention, break up clinker and build soil planting depth, create a safe network of paths, facilitate growing and help engage with our volunteers and wider site users.

This project has been really well received, with a real bounteous harvest and site opening on wednesdays too! Moving on from this initial proposal we've now built a small outdoor sink and kitchen area, with butane and wood burning rocket stoves. Sharing produce, harvesting and making use of the kitchen area to make our visitors feel really welcome has been a beautiful result of the project. There has also been interest in community composting with volunteers regularly bringing in material to compost in our 'Dalek' composters, this really helps to rebuild soil and create a sustainable method of growing.

Community engagement
As well as an amazing season of growing we've welcomed a number of new groups to the site, potential partnerships, fantastic permaculture workshops, home schooling groups, herbalists, scouts and various forest school groups among others.

Moving forward
With the increase in site use, it's really important to make sure we accommodate our site users needs, whilst balancing the needs to care for our site, protecting wildlife areas and managing biodiversity and habitat.

We'd like to arrange a follow up plan where can include our site users and collaboratively work on a design that accommodates everyone's needs so we can really help to deliver our charitable purposes, creating a safe, welcoming, inclusive and beautiful community asset.

The prior proposal
The Plan is available to view online as a webpage or download as a PDF. The proposal is a working document and has some great links to our planting schedule, planting plans along with a to-do list to outline a few of the seasonal tasks around the garden area of the project.

• Shared calendar for Saturday / Wednesday volunteering: http://tinyurl.com/MOP-Calendar
• Our Planting Plan: http://tinyurl.com/Planting-Plan
• Our Planting Schedule: http://tinyurl.com/Planting-Schedule
• Our To-Do List for the Kitchen Garden area: http://tinyurl.com/MOP-To-Do-List
• Our Link-Site: https://taplink.cc/meadoworchard
• Feedback Forum: https://meadoworchard.org/getting-involved/

Please email meadoworchardproject@gmail.com for further details.