Stony Stratford in Bloom: York House Community Garden
Stony Stratford in Bloom work to encourage and support residents, businesses and organisations in the local area to make it an attractive place to live, work and visit through horticultural and environmental enhancement. The community garden is tucked away behind the charitable volunteer-run York House Community Centre. In the early 2000’s, a derelict half acre area behind the building was transformed into an allotment style garden with raised beds and a polytunnel but by 2020 it was suffering from a lack of maintenance.
With local foodbanks seeing a huge rise in demand, volunteers from Stony Stratford in Bloom took on the community garden to grow fresh fruit and vegetables, supporting two foodbanks in local areas of deprivation with almost a tonne of food each year.
Receiving a Community Garden Grant from the National Garden Scheme earlier this year is helping Stony Stratford in Bloom to produce more fruit and vegetables over a longer period. They have built a raised tomato bed and made improvements to existing raised beds and soil. Volunteers from the community have been helping and in peak food production they were producing six crates a week which makes a huge difference to local families using the food banks.
They got in touch this summer to let us know how the projects are coming along, what’s been working well and what the challenges have been so far.
“Since April volunteers have worked weekly at the site, undertaking all the normal work we do to create supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables for two local foodbanks. Deliveries started in May and will continue until October. We have also made a good start on all four subprojects funded by our NGS grant to help us sustainably increase the quantity and variety of fresh vegetables and fruit we grow for local food banks.”
Holding work sessions on different days has been successful in bringing in more volunteers looking for after-work opportunities to get in the garden. Weed & water evening sessions also mean the core Wednesday morning volunteer group can focus more of succession sowing, plant care and harvesting.
They said “The new White Board is very useful for groups to leave each other messages about key tasks for the next session. We also use WhatsApp groups to record what we’ve achieved and discuss next tasks.
Children from a local nursery have helped plant potatoes and young people from the youth group at York House helped plant the new raised bed. Some of them already know the site from their involvement with it during primary school, and we’re pleased to be maintaining their interest as they grow older.”
We want to grow squash as a useful autumn crop for food bank users to make many different dishes, but space is limited. We have a small sunny space in front of a neighbour’s brick wall, so we are attempting to grow squash vertically, hanging off wires on a robust wooden structure which also enable us to gather rain to water the new bed.”
Future work
October – December
We will blitz bed repairs and make a start on the next fruit bed. We are planning to invite primary school eco-warriors to help pick apples in the autumn, and hold a weekend family apple session in the orchard, with the apple press that is in the budget. We may also create a wassail end of year event.
January – March
We will start more early planting. We’ll be writing bids for a potting shed and store which will let us make more use of the polytunnel for early and late crops. This will need the electricity supply to be extended further into the garden, which will also allow us to move the shredding area away from the community centre building.
We look forward to seeing what comes next at the garden!
If you’d like to know more about our Community Garden Grants, including when and how to apply, click the link below. Follow us on Instagram @ngscommunitygardens for more community gardening project stories.
