PEDAL -> Portobello Transition Town

Dingle’s Field Orchard – Portobello’s First Community Orchard.

We’re work­ing with the local author­ity to develop an orch­ard in Portobello. It will be planted and worked by local people, and the fruit will be freely avail­able to all res­id­ents. This is an example of how we can provide a pro­por­tion of our own food in a way that is enjoy­able, social and envir­on­ment­ally friendly.

Orchards can bring many bene­fits to the com­munit­ies they are in:

• It would enable a pro­por­tion of the fruit con­sumed by our com­munity to be loc­ally grown, mean­ing that it would gen­er­ate no green­house gas emis­sions.  While neg­li­gible in itself, this would sup­port the grow­ing appre­ci­ation that action on cli­mate change needs to hap­pen at all levels of society.
• As such, it would provide a use­ful pilot pro­ject for fur­ther com­munity ini­ti­at­ives across Edinburgh and fur­ther afield.
• It would develop biod­iversity and leis­ure resource in cur­rently under­used sec­tions of park­land in Portobello.
• It would provide a valu­able edu­ca­tional resource for local chil­dren and schools, which we hope will become involved in caring for the orch­ard, and using the space educationally.
• It would strengthen the sense of local com­munity, spe­cific­ally amongst the group who take care of the site, as they will need to work together at sev­eral dif­fer­ent times of year. More gen­er­ally, it will cre­ate a focus for wider com­munity activ­ity, through social and edu­ca­tional events, pro­vi­sion of seat­ing and fresh, loc­ally grown food.

The Orchard group is inter­ested in being involved in tree plant­ing and main­ten­ance, as well as har­vest­ing of the fruit. We are plan­ning to put fund­ing applic­a­tions together, which would pay for the trees, train­ing for the group, and pos­sibly some ini­tial social and edu­ca­tional events to pro­mote com­munity use of the resource.

We would like to plant a range of fruit­ing trees such as apples, pears, plums etc, par­tic­u­larly focus­ing on a range of unusual, old and local vari­et­ies. We would also like to plant some lower grow­ing soft fruit bushes such as cur­rants, goose­ber­ries etc. We have also con­sidered plant­ing some use­ful trees, such as wil­low and hazel, which could be cop­piced and used to make fen­cing or seat­ing for the area, or for craft activ­it­ies such as bas­ket weav­ing. There might also be poten­tial for other pro­jects such as a medi­cinal herb garden and bee hives.

We are com­mit­ted to work­ing with schools and local youth to help spread the skills and appre­ci­ation of local food grow­ing, as well as to pre-empt pos­sible van­dal­ism of the site.

Upcoming Orchard workdays

Location of Orchard

View all posts about the orchard

Coverage in The Scotsman: Green group plants seed of idea for free orchard

For more information:

con­tact Peter Upton, Food Worker

at peter@pedal-porty.org.uk or on 0131 258 4483