SHED at the Community Roots Gardens

10/08/2025

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03/08/2025

🍃💨Stay safe in Storm Floris friends!💨

This is our beautiful garden this evening. May it still look as beautiful and full of life when the storm clears.

Back on Wednesday 10-1 👨‍🌾

28/07/2025

Please help yourself to flowers at our entrance today! As the Village Larder is closed for urgent repairs in our room- we have these FREE flowers from Aldi to distribute. Anyone welcome to come and take a bunch to brighten up your day and feel free to come up to the garden and say hello if you want.

23/07/2025

☀️It was a gorgeous day for gardening today! Just the right amount of sunshine and passing cloud cover. We did a lot of clearing and tidying today, tying up droopy sunflowers and peas, cutting back some of our beneficial ground cover plants to make room for more light & veggie plants; removing netting from some brassicas that the butterflies had got into to allow the birds & beneficial insects to lend a hand in caterpillar control. 🐛We also removed a load of caterpillars with their favoured leaves and took them to a sheltered green spot in the Glen. 🥬
🐞We saw a few ladybugs and an array of other beneficial insects hanging out in the garden. It was a truly joyful day to be there. 🐝

👨‍🌾☕️We are open Mondays and Wednesdays 10-1(ish) for definite and sometimes we find it hard to leave and hang out a bit longer. You are very welcome to join us 🙏
Much of the produce we harvest goes to the Village Larder which is also a Community Roots project.
You can find out more here 👉The Village Larder👈

21/07/2025

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It brings our gardeners so much joy to see their produce sent up to the larder.
Our lettuces, spinach and mange tout harvest went up there today and we’ve broad beans and some more goodies going up there through the week. 😊🙏

🥗 From plot to pot: lettuce thank our Monday crew! 😉

Huge thanks to our brilliant Monday team, who not only stocked the shelves beautifully today, but also took the time to prep this gorgeous, homegrown lettuce fresh from the community garden.

It’s completely organic, lovingly grown just around the corner, and free for anyone who’d like some.

Helping out, homegrown produce and happy faces – it’s all part of what makes the Village Larder such a special community space. Thank you to everyone who pitches in!

Pop in and pick up some lettuce while it lasts 🌱

15/07/2025

We had no idea our polytunnel installation was going to be as much work as it has been, but we are getting there!
Yesterday, we shifted more soil from inside because we’ve found so much glass, rubble and a concreted path underneath the soil. It seems that there was a greenhouse or outhouse in the site previously with the remains buried under the lawn that used to be there. We want to have a large part of the interior with no-dig method beds so need to clear the extensive rubble out and of course the glass is a hazard for our gardeners.
It’s been an unexpectedly long slog and our tomato plants are trying their best outdoors in the meantime.
This summer we are unlikely to have a glut of tomatoes and cucumbers, but we are laying down the foundations for many years of abundance.
Next we will lay down cardboard and get our compost and saved good soil down on top. Then we will focus on getting autumn and winter planting inside of salads and brassicas.

We still have a lot of soil and turf to move from around the exterior so that we can have a good pathway around it and rodent protection to install in the form of steel mesh on the bottom edges.

The upside is that our main site, the Community Roots Garden has been taking quite good care of itself. Our many flowers and ground cover plants have meant that we’ve had some level of pest control without too much effort. It’s also meant less water evaporation in the hotter days.

We do miss our time in the Community Roots Garden when doing the polytunnel work, but we will be headed there tomorrow 10-1 to check for caterpillars, nurture our plants and various bits.

Pop in and join us if you like

11/07/2025

What a beautiful afternoon we have had in the Community Roots Garden today. We had just the right amount of shade to be comfortable and relax and potter about.
As it was my birthday today we had some vegan cupcakes cakes with Tara’s spectacular homemade jam and some NoSecco.

Look at how bonnie our garden is just now! This is a garden that really boosts the mood with all the lush greenery and colour, as well as a productive one. We harvested our first carrots of the year, lettuce and beet leaves for salads, broadbeans and peas.
We are so lucky to have this space and the wee community that is committed to keeping it beautiful.
👏🙏
We usually meet 10-1 Mondays and Fridays and anyone is welcome.

11/07/2025

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02/07/2025

Ants had quite the aphid farm going on in our broad beans.

26/06/2025

Do any of our local supporters or fellow garden groups/allotments have spare green courgette plants or crown prince or other winter squash plants spare?
We have been so busy organising our polytunnel and trying to take care of our warmth loving plants in windows and coldframes that we didn't have room to start green courgette or winter squash.

Thanks in advance :)

04/06/2025

Gardening teaches us resilience. Every day is a new adventure and set of problems to solve. Look at this romanesco cauliflower! The pigeons pecked it to the point of us thinking it was a lost cause.
The only reason it wasn’t removed a few weeks ago was that we had so many other tasks to do and we overlooked it. Despite not having any healthy leaves it’s producing a cauliflower curd! It’s the size of a 50p but we have faith that it might grow!
We’ve stripped the old leaves off since this pic was taken and hopefully that pulls more energy into this wee hopefully curd.

Today’s life lesson from gardening is that persistence and endurance can be found within us, even in adversity.
Let’s be like the romanesco cauliflower.
Hang in there!