Adrian Watts of St Clare’s tell us more about the community garden project he is leading.
Park Barn is a large former council estate to the north of Guildford. At its heart lies St Clare’s Church, home to a small congregation of worshippers as well as the North Guildford Foodbank and now Park Barn Community Garden.
As with many estates built during this era there are many good-sized gardens. Grass verges are still plentiful, and the church also benefits from a good sized ‘green’ adjacent to the local primary school. But these public spaces are largely green deserts with little in the way of biodiversity. This was equally true of the church green.
Inspiration from Todmorden
The inspiration for the community garden at Park Barn came from the ‘Incredible Edible’ project in Todmorden, Yorkshire, where people have come together to turn every former grass verge and every raised bed into a source of growing food for the community.
Results come slowly…
Three years after the construction of our first raised beds from old wooden pallets, we have expanded to eight raised beds, planted our first fruit trees and have built picnic benches. We are still small and trying to secure more local involvement. But even with such a modest start, things are starting to change.
With successful crops of potatoes, tomatoes and strawberries, we are seeing life return to the green – not only increased numbers of picnickers enjoying the local space, but also, slowly but surely, insect life. In fact one of our crop disasters was a great success for promoting biodiversity: our broad bean crop was completely decimated by black fly, but this in turn led to an influx of ladybirds.
We have also started to see butterflies and bees around the green – wonderful to see!
Bringing people aboard
The project has not been without its challenges - in particular in attracting local volunteers. But with the help of the wonderful Billie Pearce at Surrey Wildlife Trust we held a community engagement morning this autumn.
Surrey Wildlife Trust provided the tools, the material and know how to build ‘bug hotels’ for the twenty plus locals who attended. From this session we established that we haven’t been the greatest communicators of what we’re doing – and that yes, it really is okay to come and help yourself to the produce! We have also hopefully got the support of two new volunteers – which is immensely encouraging.
The future of the garden
In 2023 we will continue to organise the community - again with the support of Surrey Wildlife Trust. We want to interact more with businesses and schools, something we can hopefully do with our new volunteers. I am confident that we have started something that will only grow; we are very grateful to have the Trust alongside us for the journey.
