New volunteers at the garden and 8 tons of soil ordered

I went over to visit the garden today to meet the new volunteers that I wrote about last time. There were three of them there at the time and two more who were due to go over. While I was there, I decided to put some of the top soil back in the drainage pit where there was no more clay. This was mainly so we would have a bit more of a growing area back and it feels like it’s coming together well.

Our volunteers getting some seedlings growing in the greenhouse

The darker area on the left is top soil put back onto the sandy soil.

We also got confirmation that Re-entry (the charity that helps teenagers in difficult situations to achieve more stability in their lives) will be coming over for their first visit on 13 May. With the adult supervisors, there will be 10 of them, and with our volunteers, I got another 8 bags of top soil ordered from Hollybush Nurseries so we can get going on building up some raised beds, which will mean we should make significant progress in one day with around 15 of us to bring the soil in. They will come over monthly from then so I can’t wait to see how our garden develops over the year!

If you’d like to visit, either just to see or maybe to join in with the team, Wednesdays are the best, so come to the gate next to 51 Lich Avenue, Wednesfield, WV11 3DQ, call us on 07448 409336 or email at .

The garden lease and breaking through the clay

It’s been one of those times when everything happens at once. In the space of two days,  there are four things to report about the garden.

Firstly, we have started to accumulate a few volunteers this year and Maureen was there with four people on Wednesday, three of whom have already been a few times before. This is very pleasing because in theory there should be more motivation for a newcomer to return, knowing that there is already a group of people who go there and can share the work. It’s also great to see this is happening at the start of the growing season so let’s hope they continue coming and that we still get more people over time.

We are trying to arrange for the Re-Entry charity to come over, which has been in talks for a while now but they’ve been very busy. I’m not entirely sure if they are coming next week but whenever they do come, we will order 8 more bags of top soil to make more raised beds to work against any potential flooding.

Going the other way (i.e. downwards), I did some more digging in the main drainage pit and after the water had receded some more after a prolonged dry spell, I dug out some more clay to find that it wasn’t that thick and there is sandy soil underneath.

You can see this from the orangey parts so I just took off the layer of clay in the whole pit and hopefully this will lead to faster drainage as the sandy soil is a lot firmer than the squelchy clay areas. We are due some rain on Saturday so this can give us the first results. I was pleased to see that the clay layer wasn’t so deep and we will turn the pit into a feature by putting stones around the edges and essentially leaving it as a naturally varying pond!

The last thing to report is the lease that I had said had been agreed. This has been dragging on for months now and I’ve had to complain about this because we need it for our paperwork and so that we can apply for funding. This is because some funding organisations want to see a long lease if they are going to award money. It was sent through to me yesterday but I am asking for some amendments before I sign it. When it’s ready, we’ll have the lease for 20 years, which will be a good source of security.

We need to start thinking of our next open day now, as well!

More progress with the garden’s drainage pit

After having some rain last week, it was fortunate to have some warm dry days so that the drainage pits would empty enough to do some more digging. We’re still confident that they are going to have a positive effect regarding the flooding so I built a container to store the clay (for future use – hopefully at an open day) and got to work.

The first photo shows the main pit after I’d dug out about 2 wheelbarrows full of clay and the second one shows how it was after 13 barrows. This was a significant amount of clay, which you can see from the photo below. I only made that container before I started so according to Archimedes’ displacement theory 😉 that creates quite a lot of space for the water to fill instead it being higher than we would like.

We know that it will work because of the different levels of water in parts that haven’t been dug as low as that big area now is. From the next photo, the water in the small area is about 10cm higher than in the larger area so when there is the space for it to go to, it will drain from the more porous areas of the garden.

There’s still a lot to dig out of the area we marked out so hopefully I’ll get a chance to go back next week.

In other news about the garden, we’ve been having a few interested people coming to visit and think about volunteering so that’s good, especially so early in the growing season.

The fruit trees have been planted so that’s good to know we will have an extra benefit to come from the garden, obviously after some time, though.

We also had an article in the Wednesfield Magazine, so hopefully that will lead to a one or two more local people getting in touch. Unfortunately, the blog address is wrong so I hope any new people will search for us instead!