Our next big event at Auchincruive is an open day on Sunday – I keep saying to myself it does not need to look perfect but…. Well almost perfect! Do come along – we are hoping to sell lots of plants and volunteers have so far cooked 71 scones ready to be set out in the Stovehouse with tray bakes and cups of tea …. So the perennial prayer no to weeds yes to sun.

We are hoping to see the other charities in our Provost’s 8 – 8 charities she has chosen to  support, as well as the owners of Su Casa a wonderful café in town who are thinking of buying some of our vegetables  on a regular basis. They get rave reviews on trip advisor so I hope we are up to it.

In London ISS have started work on the new outreach garden – nasty nasty Japanese knot weed has been found pushing up through the tarmac – did I mention my thing about weeds?  We have put up a new page about the garden’s development on the website so you can follow it.

I am sad to miss the RHS Chelsea Flower show but garden designer Paul Hervey-Brookes is selling off all the plants he has used in aid of Gardening Leave – the garden is about the two sides of our personality our inside thoughts and our outside communication – perfect for Gardening Leave and a big thanks to BrandAlley for their support on this one.

The BrandAlley garden at RHS Chelsea

Our fundraising assistant Sallie tells me her sister is showing her paintings at Chelsea, so if you’re passing pop in and see her as well  http://www.susanentwistle.com/-  so lets hope it is very sunny in London all week.

Talking of sunshine -at the end of May I will be up at Gardening Scotland where our own Ray of sunshine has been working very hard with Turffit  to build a show garden. Ray Howie used to come to Gardening Leave and is really developing as a Garden designer. Doing a show garden is a lot of effort and a lot of stress  so we all wish him lots of sunshine to help things along. I know he is worried that so many of the plants are late because of that late spring, so fingers crossed for him.

So as I said the gardener’s prayer for May – no to weeds yes to sunshine, and could I ask for a few more days in May to get it all done.

Heather

Hi Gardening Leave fans! This has been an eventful month and a half and has brought lots of exciting news and activities. It also brought a lot of weeds in the garden. I have been keeping things ticking over and we have some lovely sweetcorn, squash, peas and loads of rampant broad beans. Heidi (a gardener for the Royal Hospital) has very kindly given us a huge number of geraniums too which are floating around looking for a good home. When the daffodils are truly dead perhaps they will be a good replacement. During April, our Chelsea Pensioners created some lovely things such as gutter gardens. These really brighten up our shed and will be a perfect home for salad leaves during the summer which we can harvest for our sandwiches.

Gutter gardens!

Thankfully, with the warmer weather we have been able to work outside more often (I even got sunburnt a couple of weeks back!) and we have been planting veggies for the MTI café.

In mid April (the 10^th) I had the privilege of showing four wonderful ladies around the garden and they were kind enough to donate some money to Gardening Leave, a big thank you to the Martin Charitable Trust and the Rosary Gardens in South Kensington. Whilst exploring the greenhouses, they caught a glimpse of our lovely hand-made and hand-painted bird-boxes (made by the pensioners carpentry club) and asked if they could buy some -they think we’re onto something with these as a fundraising idea. Andy, the guardsman, has also bagsied a box so look out for photos of more to come.

Towards the end of April I had some leave and went on holiday so things were quiet in the garden. I returned to find some very dry and sad looking plants but they’ve since perked up. A few days after coming back from leave, I was hopping onto a train to sunny Scotland to work with Pam, Victoria, Evelyn, Sallie, Heather and the rest of the Ayrshire gang! I stayed two weeks, met lots of incredible people and learnt a great deal. I was made to feel so welcome and for this I cannot thank everyone up in Scotland enough. What a fantastic bunch! During my stay, I was sent on a course to learn about helping our clients – Heather is very keen on the professional development of her staff – which taught me all kinds of useful things. Simple communication was emphasised the most.

Upon my return to the garden, I was confronted by a jungle of weeds and I have been working away at them all day. Clover is now the bane of my existence. This morning, our pensioners were sowing lettuce, various salads, carrots, radishes and spinach for the café which should be ready for harvest in around 3 weeks. Pictures to follow!

Our shed with gutter gardens in place

More general news around Gardening Leave Chelsea includes an exciting new garden opening up in East Acton. We will soon be working to transform a garden owned by CHT Homebase (http://www.cht.org.uk/index.php) from a slab of tarmac to a green paradise – again, pictures and more on this to follow. ISS (http://www.issworld.com/Pages/Frontpage.aspx) will be working with us to achieve this and hopefully will do some work on our own lovely Chelsea patch in the Autumn. Thank you ISS. Also coming up is the Open Garden Squares Weekend (OGSW), during which we will be allowing the public to come and have a nosey at our garden. We hope that this will help us to raise awareness of the problems our veterans face and go a little way towards achieving our aim of reducing the stigma attached to mental health problems in the community. The garden will be open on the 8^th and 9^th of June and tickets are available through the OGSW website.

Finally, I must thank See It Gro for donating a vast number of grow bags. We cannot thank our donors enough and the grow bags will be put to very good use! Thank you See It Grow! (http://www.seeitgro.co.uk/).

Well, that’s about it from me for now. Same time next month!

Zisky

So here is a tip for people who want to blog – don’t take a break at Christmas because you might find it’s May before you blog again!

It’s been a long hard winter both in the garden and in the office, but today was one of those days that make it all worth while. It’s true that spring has sprung, but this is a very springy spring – I am so excited I don’t know where to start. Today I went to visit the East Acton CHT Homebase therapeutic community for veterans in London. A long name for a brilliant place.  Out back is a desolate patch of tarmac facing onto the looming walls and towers of Wormwood Scrubs prison. Thanks to the incredible support of ISS this will be our new outreach garden in London.

The new East Acton garden – before transformation!

Followers of Gardening Leave will know that there has always been a problem for veterans trying to reach our Chelsea site on public transport. So we have decided to take the garden to them!

I spent the afternoon with three of the residents talking about what the garden should be like, measuring it up and taking pictures. We were all so excited imagining green where now there was dark brick – sweet peas and chillies, seats in the sun   I admit I went with all our ideas of what would help veterans feel safe – no bushes for people to hide behind, open space , line of site to the door. All the things we find we need in our gardens. But this was very different …they wanted enclosed inner space, private corners, a BBQ, strawberries in gutter gardens but definitely no raspberries, winding paths. I had not taken into consideration the fact this was their home and they already felt safe. As much as possible we will use raised beds so people don’t have to bend to garden and we will be borrowing some ideas form our other tarmac paradise in Erskine – there will even be a patch of grass.

Perhaps what made me even happier was their determination to join in the building work and that they wanted the garden to sound natural and best of all they want the birds to come.

East Acton garden – veterans who helped us measure up for the new project

So ISS is going to build it  – something none of us could have afforded to do – raised beds for vegetables, a herb garden near the barbeque, hanging baskets for tomatoes, and bird feeding stations everywhere, a live willow woven screen round a seating area and strawberry gutter gardens. It is going to be lovely. Gardening Leave will run it and provide horticultural therapy for veterans in two half day sessions.  And we all hope that CHT and the veterans at their various houses will enjoy it.

With a lot of hard work we hope to open it on Armed Forces Day June 26.

We are definitely keeping our Chelsea site open both as a hub and to provide horticultural therapy to those who can reach us. Later in the year ISS is going to weave their magic on the Chelsea garden so it is all hip high raised beds which will be easier for everyone.

Those with eagle eyes will have spotted that our website is evolving – if you want to keep up with progress in the CHT Homebase we will be setting up a new page with all the pictures. All the staff are making big efforts to Tweet more of our news from the first bumble bees to operation daffodil thanks to Dobbies in Ayr.

Oh yes and no more blogging breaks!

Heather

Broad beans get their own support

It has been another busy month at Auchincruive and it is encouraging to see more colour appearing around the garden, with daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, primula, forget me nots and violas all in bloom.  As well as indoor sowing and planting, we have also been busy outside.  We have transplanted our onions (grown from seed), the broad beans are also in the ground and a plant support constructed around them!  Sweet peas are now in the troughs on the terrace and they should give us a lovely show once the daffodils and wallflowers have finished.  Now that the weather is improving and the soil is heating up, we are continuing with the process of hardening off, therefore space is at a premium in the cold frame!

Sowing in the Stovehouse

Plant sales continue to go well.  There has been an increase in the number of salad bags provided to the poultry shop each week and we have harvested and sold the first of the carrots grown in tubs in the stove house.  There has been more hard work done to the Stovehouse border.  We have been raking …. and raking to produce a fine tilth as we intend to plant up the border with annual bedding plants.  Apparently, this was common practise by SAC staff over the years www.sruc.ac.uk .  We would also like to thank the Balfour brothers for applying the much needed shading (cool glass) to the Stovehouse windows!

The terrace is in the process of being tidied as we work towards opening the garden on Sunday 26^th May for Scotland’s Gardens  www.scotlandsgardens.org. This will be an ideal opportunity to show the work that is done at Gardening Leave.

Working the soil outside the Stovehouse

Evelyn and Victoria attended the Ambassador Bowling club in Prestwick www.ambassadorprestwick.com and delivered a presentation about Gardening Leave to the Auchincruive floral arts club.  We would like to thank the group for their kind donation of £500.

Victoria attended a course on willow weaving at Lambhill Stable www.lambhillstables.org   The day went well and she returned to the garden with her creation, which was a very professional looking plant support.  We hope to use this knowledge and make some of our own garden sundries with the willow that has been stored at Auchincruive.

We have a couple of visitors (of the feathered variety) to the garden this month, a mallard duck nesting on the terrace wall, and we welcome back the swallows!

Pamela

First harvest of the year

April 2013

Finally the warm(ish) weather has arrived, sunshine, blustery winds, heavy showers, lambs, daffodils and spring has truly sprung..  Despite the slow start to the year (weather wise) with perseverance and determination (and continual repairs to the polytunnel) we are taking our first harvests from the fruits of our labour earlier in the year…. spinach has been taken to the hospital kitchen and we’ve started selling fresh salad bags.  We had a delicious mix of spicy leaves which was drastically reduced one evening when a rabbit broke in to the polytunnel under the cover of darkness and feasted on the Mizuna leaves!!!   So until the next crop is ready we shall work with the mustard, radish leaf, spinach and chives.  To be fair we did have our share of salad in the lunch time rolls but my personal favourite was the spontaneous rhubarb crumble which was rustled up one dreich morning…

We held off our outdoor planting due to the late frosts we’ve been having but finally the potatoes were put into their trenches.  Tam spent a good two days sieving through one of the back raised beds to prepare it for the seed sowing of carrots and parsnips.  Next door to that we have sown rainbow chard and white beetroot and a pleasant couple of mornings were spent devising and constructing different structures for our peas and mangetout to climb up over the coming summer months  We have an abundance of seedlings for purchase… marigolds, peppers, cucumbers, courgettes, strawberry plants and the list goes on…  To increase our covered planting space we fixed a door to our smaller and cooler second polytunnel, here we planted gourd, pumpkin and courgette and made space for some of our cooler loving herbs such as sage and thyme.  Talking of which, the herb boxes we have been working on have proven very successful, so much so that we’ve had to concentrate our efforts on herb propagation and box construction at the end of the month to supply the demand!!

Herb box

Phew… amidst the hustle and bustle of planting, the daily responsibilities of the garden are rapidly coming into our routine as watering and hardening off are both regularly appearing on the task board.  Thanks to Helen Jackson who kindly donated a huge batch of garden bluebells to the site.  As an investment for the future we spent many an afternoon potting them up.  Thanks also to Erskine Garden Centre who have provided us with some pretty spring flowers which we can use to bring instant colour to the site!

Spring just wouldn’t be spring without the familiar and often reminiscent childhood sound of the buzz of the bumble bee..  From hibernation they buzzed mid April here in the gardens and they appear to just keep on coming… honey bees and buff tailed appear to be the most common, no butterflies yet but hopefully they will come fluttering by soon enough!  We are registering for the bee walk with the Bumble Bee Conservation Trust (www.bumblebeeconservation.org/get-involved/surveys) and hope to get involved at the start of June in the ‘garden bioblitz’ (www.naturewatched.org/takingpartgbb) a scheme were we get to search through the ‘jungle’ of the garden to record what wildlife actually resides here (present veterans obviously excluded!!).

Enjoy the sunshine..

Wendy

Garden Open at GL

For full details of the event click here : Beyond Injury_16 5 13

There are some other new faces about the site as we welcome Heather, our GL CEO, who is joining the site for three months to assist in implementing the new vision document. We also welcome Sally, who is knew to GL and is assisting Heather with fundraising.  We welcome Brenda back on site and hope that she gets into the garden soon. We’ve had so many comings and goings over the past few months and I’d like to offer a warm belated welcome to our new volunteers, Sandy G, Ian, Graeme and John.  Volunteers are a huge asset to Gardening Leave and we are thankful for the dedication, patience and hard work which all of our volunteers put in.

Ian, who has been assisting us with caring for our bonsai trees, is back and will be with us for the first Wednesday of each month to show us month by month care of the Bonsai trees. In the workshop, a lot of things have been made for use in the garden; the fantastic covers for the moveable raised beds were a huge success and made from 100% recycled material.  The second polytunnel has a planting area installed and the first polytunnel has been securely patched up to see us through another season.

In the garden we continue to sow marigolds, transplant bedding plants, Brussels sprouts, peppers, cucumbers, salads, courgettes and leeks… although still a little early for some of the more tender crops to be planted outside, we’ve been preparing the raised beds for planting.

Gallery for March

We received a huge load of wood chips from Purple Tree Care purpletreecare.co.uk one afternoon, thank you.  We also got a friendly call from Natalie at Lambhill Stables lambhillstables.org who came to visit our site.  Lambhill Stables is a beautiful site situated alongside the canal in North Glasgow – the gardens amble up the hillside and verge onto Possil Marsh with the backdrop of the Campsie hills (from which a bitter wind blew down!!!!!)  We thoroughly enjoyed our visit to the gardens to see what they are up to, really appreciated the warming soup from their café and are very appreciative of the willow which we exchanged for some heathers… Thanks Natalie and we look forward to getting creative with the willow… though we may keep it simple at first!!  Youtube.com/watch.

Keep warm,

Wendy

For more on the garden, please check out Gardening Leave Erskine.

During February, much of our time was devoted to planting seeds. We now have a host of Sweet-corn, Broad Beans, Sweet Peas, Geraniums (kindly donated by Heidi and Ron of the RHC) and various other vegetables and flowers. We are hoping to plant these up into some nice home-made veggie crates – photographs will follow! We tried to resuscitate some Snap Dragons which had, sadly, succumbed to mildew but it’s not looking good so far. We also had a nasty infestation of some ugly white little monster, the name of which I never managed to find out, but Heidi came to our rescue with the bug spray! Many of our plants had to be sacrificed though.

March brought a couple of nice sunny days; I even took my jumper off once! Some of the first week was spent painting plant pots to give to people. The Adjutant, Colonel Simon Bate OBE now has a happy looking polyanthus sitting on his windowsill in a Chelsea Pensioner themed pot.

For the Chelsea Pensioners Gardening Club, this month has been full of exciting endeavours! We began the month with Spring Pots. Ian and I bought some metal pots, acrylic pens and a supply of spring flowers such as Dwarf Narcissus, Hyacinths and Primroses. We used acetate, a marker pen and a scalpel to make our own spring themed stencils for the pensioners to use and they spent a lovely morning decorating and planting up.

Our next project was more seed sowing upon request from another pensioner, Jimmy. Jimmy has a fondness for Lupins and, armed with four packets of them, we got down to business. They are coming up beautifully and will need potting up in the not too distant future. 

Since then, an experimental mood has taken over and we decided to make mini terrariums.  It had been arranged with Claire that four photographers from the British Legion would come to the greenhouse to photograph the pensioners, so after making everyone tea, Ian and I proceeded to talk through making a terrarium. We had bought a selection of succulents and cacti (the non-spiky type), a variety of glasses, some sand, gravel and found some pretty shells and stones. The result was a potting tray full of planted up glasses of all shapes and sizes. Patrick took his terrariums home with him and they are sitting happily next to his spring pots on the windowsill.

Perhaps the most exciting news of the past two months however, is that the Chelsea Garden and some of our veterans are soon to be in your very own living room on TV. Recently, a documentary called “Battle Scarred” was filmed by Chris Tirrell (who you may have seen being awarded a green beret at the age of 55!). The documentary on Channel 5 focuses on the difficulties faced by veterans back home in “civvy street” and our very own Ian and Lloyd were brave enough to talk about their experiences. The first of the four part series is on Monday the 8^th and Gardening Leave will feature in the episode on the 22^nd of April.

Chelsea gallery for March

Thank you so much to Chris Tirrell, his wife Christine and everyone else at Upper Cut Films for being so supportive of Gardening Leave and so concerned for its veterans. We sincerely appreciate it and hope that this is the start of a strong friendship.

“Use plants to bring life.”

Douglas Wilson

Happy gardening

Zisky Stovell

For more on the garden please check out Gardening Leave Chelsea

A willow hedge has been planted out in front of the gardening leave building by one of our Hollybush veterans.  This is being watered to encourage root growth and will, once grown, be shaped into an arched walkway to provide a much needed shady area.

The greenhouses are brimming over with seeds sown this month. Veterans and volunteers have sown broccoli, cabbage, leeks and broad beans in the greenhouse. These have germinated and will be hardened off once the better weather arrives. We have also sown parsnips into a covered bed and carrots and radish directly into covered raised beds.  March has been an ideal month to start off perennials including, Shasta daisy, Echinacea and Rudbeckia. Annual seeds including Marigold, Lobelia and Petunia were also sown to provide a colourful display for the hanging baskets later in the year.

In the garden the poppy beds have been fed and weeded and are looking great. A group of veterans emptied the compost bin and barrowed it to empty onto the raised bed in preparation for sowing more vegetables and salad crops.  Since space is at a premium and glass houses are full to bursting we are using the raised beds for storing onions and bedding sown earlier this year. This is all well protected with two layers of fleece.

The stove house now has a set of ladders in situ in preparation for applying greenhouse shading before the hot weather arrives. Also thanks to Stevie we have a full set of woodwork tools to enable work to start on constructing bird boxes in the near future. In the middle of March, Stevie and Frank, our woodwork volunteer, ran a training day for staff and volunteers. Stevie ran through health and safety procedures and Frank demonstrated the basic woodwork skills required for using hand held tools. We are looking forward to moving on to the next stage to construct our own bird boxes!

Pamela and Victoria attended the Trellis www.trellisscotland.org.uk  networking conference in Perth and took part in workshops looking at plant hardiness by Jim McColl MBE and pests and diseases in fruit trees given by Andrew Lear. This was an opportunity to meet with staff from other projects and exchange ideas.

We were delighted to welcome the provost Helen Mooney to GL  Auchincruive this month.  Helen was given a guided tour of the site and an insight into the horticultural therapy provided to our veterans both in the garden and the stove house.  Julie Muir, a horticultural student from Edinburgh botanic gardens, also visited the gardens this month as part of her project.

All the latest from the March gallery

Finally we were very sad to say goodbye to Stevie this month, he will be greatly missed by staff and veterans here. The completed sections of the stove house are a testimony to his dedication hard work and skilful management of volunteers and visiting squadrons providing a wonderful indoor area for horticultural therapy accessible to all.

Until next time

Victoria

For more on the garden please check out Gardening Leave Auchincruive