This week, I made a long overdue visit to the Shared Earth Learning co-operative’s polytunnel and allotment. It’s just a 30 min walk from my home in Frome, and I’d last visited in late March, just before moving house and starting a new job. Things have been rather busy since then, so it’s been four months since my last visit.
Here’s the Shared Earth Learning polytunnel and fireplace in late March, when I last took a snap…
And here it is in early August. The co-op and forest school has been busy, producing some beautiful flowers and veg. All organic, using mostly hand tools and traditional methods.
The sweetpeas and sunflowers outside the tunnel have done very well.
The bees appear to enjoy the sunflowers.
Inside, the beans and courgettes are producing a plentiful crop. Alex, one of the wonderful women leading this fantastic project gave me a massive courgette. I’ll give her a hand with the accounts and admin later this month, which seems a fair exchange, as I also got a lovely bunch of sweetpeas.
Recently the Shared Earth Learning team got a bit of funding from Frome Town Council to offer subsided Forest School sessions, so more local kids can come to learn about nature in this amazing space (find out more on SELco Facebook page). There’s also a new Facebook group for SELco Playrangers, which offers forest school as a free after school activity at the Mount, in Frome.
Shared Earth Learning is a small community co-op, and it manages to do wonderful things on a shoe string budget. There’s dozens of similar community minded, eco positive organisations in the local area, and hopefully there are some like minded people around your way too. In uncertain political times, where the environment seems to be in real trouble and politics is idiotic and dangerous, it’s good to take time outside to see what’s growing, and find people doing positive things.
PS – My week off has been mostly spent napping, seeing friends, attending Fayres, admiring flowers, eating and snoozing, with zero projects completed. It’s been just about perfect so far. Once my batteries are recharged it’s back to the plan.
🙂
Doing The Plan 
Why are flowers so popular in these sorts of demonstration gardens? Are they just more interesting than vegetable flowers? I remember that when I was a kid, I really enjoyed nasturtium flowers. Corn bloom was not so much fun. Neither were tomato flowers.
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They grow more veg than flowers, but I find the flowers more photogenic… and I think the best plots mix it up, with flowers and veg, and wild spaces…
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Oh, of course. I did not consider that some might not find vegetables to be so interesting.
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It’s the bright blooms that catch the eye, and bring the bees along to pollinate the veg. This project is in an allotment section of an organic shareholding and wild camp site. I love what they do there, but it’s almost entirely veg plots and wild spaces with newly planted woodland, and brambles and nettles. It is amazingly buzzing with life, but I think it’s lovely to add a few cottage garden plants to make the space a bit brighter. There’s space for sweetpea as well as beetroot and spuds…. 🙂
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I joined at the end of May this year after I felt a bit lost of what to do after the past couple of years I went downhill after my charity shop closed down, when someone mentioned gardening to me I thought, I am not going to like this a lot, as I had not done much gardening before, I met Alyson Evans who told me more about it, then on my first Monday I met Alex Hart and over the next few weeks I thought that they are very nice ladies after I got used to them a bit more and I like watering and I like to be in fresh air and Alyson and Alex buy custard cream biscuits for me to eat, I still don’t think that I am good at gardening at all but I really like being around Alex and Alyson a lot learning about what they do
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Hi Richard, it’s an amazing project isn’t it? I might see you round there sometime 🙂
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