Communigrow
Communigrow Stories – Improving Wellbeing
“Enjoyment of meeting new people, learning new things. Making new friends gets harder as you get older & this group whilst all being quite different from each other are friendly and welcoming”
February 2022
Meet The Team – An interview with Amy Simon, one of the most kind and generous volunteers we have at Communigrow.
“Volunteering with Communigrow has absolutely reinforced my interest in gardening and growing.”
December 2021
Meet The Team – An interview with Claudia Hebblewhite, one of our most versatile volunteers.
“Whether you are thinking about volunteering in the field or volunteering remotely, Communigrow has been an amazing experience allowing me to learn from like-minded people and has taught me so many valuable skills.”
September 2021
Meet The Team – An interview with Lauren Parker, one of our committed volunteers.
“One of the favourite things I have learnt through volunteering with Communigrow is the idea of a community being able to come together to create amazing things.”
July 2021
Meet The Team – An interview with Charley Pope, one of our talented volunteers.
“Having the opportunity to help at the field as well as create Communigrow’s recipes, I have such a wonderful insight into the seasonal food and then taking it and making something delicious with it. I think more and more people are starting to realise how wonderful that journey is. ”
May 2021
Meet the team Charley
The past few Mondays have been all go in the seed sowing department. From preparing the beds to the actual seed sowing.
A few weeks ago now we started off with some onion and garlic sets. Onion varieties such as Red Baron and Centurion to a bright Pink Panther are beginning to poke through only a few weeks later. And these are just the sets. The seeds in the greenhouse are all looking incredibly well and will be planted out in a few weeks time. Safe to say there will be plenty of onions to go round.
Learning how to use the rotavator has been a bit of an adventure and incredibly satisfying. There’s no need to go to the gym when rotavating is on the cards. It’s a brilliant transformation taking the beds and preparing them for the growing season ahead.
Parsnips have also gone in, ready for their long growing season ahead. The first frosts later in the year should help enhance their flavour, ready for Christmas! Carrots have also been sown alongside spring onions. The spring onions have been strategically planted nearby to hopefully help deter carrot fly.
The final project started this week has been the ‘Moon Bed’. A bed that is going to be solely devoted to planting according to the moon phases. Simply put, the idea behind this is that fruit and vegetables that bear crops above ground perform better during certain phases of the moon, with bulbs and vegetables that bear crops below ground performing better during other phases. Watch this space as the moon bed develops!
-Charley (Social Media Volunteer)
Meet The Team – An interview with Clair Evans, one of our brilliant growers here at the Communigrow field.
“There is definitely no typical day! From raking stones to building bird boxes, who knows what a day at Communigrow will hold?!”
March 2021
Meet the team Clair
Giving discarded materials an inspiring second life – Written by Julia C. with inputs from Maria, Clair and David.
At Communigrow, we care about land and nature conservation, as well as wellbeing and we are proudly
reusing and recycling where we can. Recently we have realised just how many projects around the field
were possible thanks to reused materials!
February 2021
Giving discarded materials an inspiring second life
Meet The Team – An interview with Julia Czernik, one of our hard working volunteers and the new addition to the team by Euan Philipps.
“Things are more peaceful, and you feel this sense of calmness, but at the end of the day you get a huge sense of achievement”
February 2021
Meet the team Julia
Upon visiting the Communigrow field for the first time the first thing that struck me was what a beautiful spot it was. David, our Horticultural Leader, said to me with a big smile, “It’s great, my job is to come and work in a walled garden!”, and I couldn’t agree more.
It was a brilliant, crisp January morning and one of the first jobs was to feed the birds. Something that I immediately admired was the way in which there is such a sense of working with nature, not against it.
A veg box needed to be put together for one of our trustees so I helped assemble a wide array of different winter goodies. As a complete novice I was surprised how many things were still growing during these colder months. Salad leaves of different shapes and textures, brussel sprouts cut straight from the stalk and magnificent rainbow chard leaves full of colour in the winter sun. The veg boxes are one of my personal favourites at Communigrow; a real showcase of local produce and community supported agriculture at its best.
We finally got to sew some early onions and a few other early seeds. These would be started off in the greenhouse and then eventually planted out. There was something quite relaxing about the process, topped off by being completely surrounded by the great outdoors. I’m very much looking forward to learning about growing, and hopefully being able to translate that into some home grown fruit and veg of my own!
-Charley (Social Media Volunteer)