OsNosh Outside - Growing The Garden

The environment

By developing the green spaces surrounding The Centre, and planting a greater variety of pollinator plants we are encouraging new habitat creation, leading to greater biodiversity within an urban environment. Education is the key to long-term environmental change. Our use of food from the community garden is a talking point in the cafe which leads to conversations and education around food security, and the roles we can all play. Our composting Hotbins are looked after by our Master Composter volunteer and are used as working examples to run training sessions on composting. Most of our café food waste is now composted in hotbins to generate compost, which is then used to feed the herbs and vegetables grown in the garden. This lessens the amount of food miles by using produce we have grown or purchased locally. By planting of trees and bushes in our our forest garden, we are now helping to both capture carbon and lower the amount produced in relation to what we do.

The local economy

Plants and trees for our Community garden project were sourced from local growers as well as bulk compost and woodchip. Staff were paid to run the volunteer working groups, and staff support local businesses by buying their food, and daily requirements within the town.

Volunteering, jobs & education

Every part of this project has involved either working with local community organisation and businesses, or by working with our volunteers and participants. We ran workshops with both our local community and volunteers to design, build and decorate the seating, education space, sensory garden and nature trail. Our garden club planted everything needed for the new garden space and the interactive educational materials, and Aico, one of our local businesses, sent a team of their staff to work in the Community Garden for the day, planting, and moving the huge amounts of woodchip and compost required! Through all of this, there will be so many opportunities to learn about our local eco system, and the skills needed in order to nurture and maintain it.

Activity, health and leisure

From the cultivation of new flower beds, to a space for wellbeing workshops and outdoor cooking events, this project has created opportunity for physical activity and leisure for people from diverse groups within our local community. Interacting with green spaces, and the physical activity involved is an immensely powerful tool when it comes to nurturing mental health and wellbeing. One of the primary reasons for us further developing our outdoor green spaces was so we can offer more activities specifically designed for this. During the summer the garden we ran weekly treasure hunt sessions around the garden, and supplied picnics from the cafe to enjoy in the garden. Our volunteers, local residents and staff can often be found enjoying a peaceful 10minutes and a cuppa in the garden throughout the year, and it's lovely to see local people wandering through whilst walkingtheir dogs, and stopping for a look at the flowers or to pick some herbs.