Category Archives: gardening

Community Growing Spaces Meeting

Posted on April 8, 2011 | Leave a comment

PEDAL has been offered a num­ber of bits of land to use as com­munity food grow­ing spaces. We now need to work out how we are going to use them – is there a group want­ing to take on each of the spaces? Would people like a train­ing course (we would need to charge for this as we don’t have any more fund­ing) to kick start the process?

Would you like to get involved in devel­op­ing a com­munity farm?

If you think this sounds excit­ing and would like to get involved in any way then please come to a meet­ing on Tuesday 26th April 7.30 – 9.30 at Portobello Community Centre.  If you’re not able to make the meet­ing but are inter­ested in get­ting involved please let me know jane@gn.apc.org

Look for­ward to see­ing you there.

Jane

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Posted in Community, events, Food, gardening

Free orchard management course

Posted on March 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

Fruitful Skills for a Fruitful Scotland

Interested in setting up or running a community or school orchard?
Want to know more about caring for trees in an established orchard?

Edinburgh and Lothians Greenspace Trust is offer­ing a free com­munity orch­ards man­age­ment course on Saturday 26th March, 10am — 4pm

Aimed at people already run­ning or think­ing about set­ting up a com­munity orch­ard, for more details see ELGT’s web­site

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Posted in Courses, gardening, Orchards

Scottish Orchards Fife Networking events

Posted on February 28, 2011 | Leave a comment

Please see inform­a­tion about the Scottish Orchards Fife/ East Coast Gathering

They are look­ing to roll out this train­ing and net­work­ing to oth­er parts of Scotland so even if you cant get to this one, they are open to ideas.

Scottish Orchards Fife_East Coast Gathering[1]

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Posted in gardening, Orchards

Planting Week at Greendykes Allotments

Posted on February 25, 2011 | Leave a comment

Greendykes Organic Allotments are hold­ing a Planting Week between 4 – 11th March. To kick start things they are look­ing for volun­teers to help plant 200 nat­ive trees on 4th March between 10am — 2pm.

Tools, gloves and refresh­ments will be provided. Bring spades or extra plants if you have them!

For fur­ther inform­a­tion please con­tact Brian Shields on 0131 6613504 (wk) or 0131 6605351 (hm) or brian.shields@edinburgh.gov.uk

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Posted in events, gardening, Volunteering

Grow your own vegetables course

Posted on February 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

Are you inter­ested in grow­ing your own veget­ables but don’t know where to start?  Join Damhead Nursery where veget­able expert Jim Williams from the National Vegetable Society will be intro­du­cing you to the delights of grow­ing your own food, how to estab­lish a kit­chen garden and pick up simple tips to get you star­ted, wheth­er you have a large over­grown plot, small patch or a win­dow box.  He will cov­er top­ics such as seed sow­ing, get­ting the best out of your green­house, pests/weed con­trol, com­post­ing, crop rota­tion and soil pre­par­a­tion.  After his talk par­ti­cipants will ven­ture into the nurs­ery for a hands-on prac­tic­al exercise.

When Friday 11 March 2011
Where Damhead Nursery
Time 1:30pm — 4:00pm
Cost £25.00 (includ­ing tea/coffee & cake)
Bring Warm clothes for hands on prac­tic­al outside/poly tunnel
Booking There are a lim­ited num­ber of spaces.  To book your place either call

Damhead Nursery on 0131 445 4698 or email michelles@damheadnursery.co.uk

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Posted in Food, gardening

Potato Day

Posted on January 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,Please find attached a pro­mo­tion­al fly­er for Bridgend’s annu­al Potato Day on Sunday February 20th. Please note that this event is being held at the Bridgend Allotments on Old Dalkeith Road and NOT at Inch House as in pre­vi­ous years. Parking is lim­ited, so if you’re com­ing by car, please try to park elsewhere.

If you are com­ing to buy seed pota­toes, we would appre­ci­ate it if you could bring your own bags! A list of seed vari­et­ies avail­able is also attached.

Hope to see you on the 20th.

Tattie Day 2011

Seed Tattie List 2011

Rob Ford

Project Officer

Bridgend Allotments Community Health Project

Tel. 07789 650878

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Posted in Food, gardening

Mushroom Growing Course

Posted on January 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

Learn to cul­tiv­ate your own mush­rooms, such as oyster mush­rooms on logs (as well as oth­er environments/ sub­strates). 19th February 10am-1pm at the por­to­bello com­munity cen­ter.  The course will be led by mush­room expert Dr Neville Kilkenny. Please con­tact us for fur­ther details.

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Posted in Courses, Food, gardening

Local Food Links Meeting

Posted on January 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

Local Food Links

Tuesday 25th January from 7 – 9pm

Portobello Community Centre

At the last Local Food Links get togeth­er we talked about what we wanted to to achieve in a years time…now we want to get things moving!

We want to bring togeth­er as many people as pos­sible who have been involved in PEDAL’s food pro­jects,  and people who are inter­ested in loc­al food but haven’t yet man­aged to get involved.  Folk will be able to choose the top­ic they’re most keen on and work with oth­ers to plan what can be done over the next year.

There are exist­ing pro­jects like Fruitful Porty or the Portobello Organic Market, which has been incred­ibly suc­cess­ful, but is only fun­ded until the end of March, so it needs volun­teers if it is to con­tin­ue being the great com­munity event it is.  As well as ideas for new pro­jects rais­ing loc­al food aware­ness or set­ting up a com­munity shop.

So, if you are inter­ested in the future of loc­al food in Portobello, come along!

We hope to see you there!

For more inform­a­tion on the first loc­al food links meet­ing see our earli­er post­ing and food page

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Posted in Food, gardening, Market, Orchards, PEDAL, Volunteering

2 day Introduction to Permaculture

Posted on January 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

22/23 January 2011 

Colinton Community Compost,

Edinburgh.

EH13 0PQ

Sliding scale price from £45-£75 — but please don’t let money be the reas­on you don’t attend. 

For more inform­a­tion and a book­ing form, con­tact James Chapman — 

07790 265883 or 01337 842277 james@tree-wise-men.com


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Posted in Composting, Courses, Food, gardening

FREE Community Gardener Training

Posted on December 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

In February and March 2011, The Edinburgh Community Backgreens Association (ECBA) will be run­ning a FREE Community Gardener train­ing pro­gramme, cov­er­ing all the skills you need to become a fully fledged com­munity garden­er in your neighbourhood.

During the course of the train­ing, we will estab­lish a com­munity garden­er net­work so the par­ti­cipants can sup­port each other’s pro­jects after the train­ing has finished.

This train­ing is for any­one who is involved in com­munity garden­ing pro­jects, or any­one who would like to start or get involved with a pro­ject.  The par­ti­cip­at­ory approach to train­ing means that we will draw on par­ti­cipants’ var­ied know­ledge and exper­i­ences to learn.

Course Content
some of the key themes we will cov­er are:

* Models for Community Gardening with­in a Tenemental Context
* How to recruit group mem­bers and pub­li­cise Community Backgreen projects
* Design Issues and cre­at­ing a devel­op­ment plan for your site
* Carrying out your back­green plans: run­ning work­shops etc
* Running a Community Backgreen Group
* Establishing a sup­port net­work for the newly trained Community Gardeners

Dates and Location
The Community Gardener train­ing will run on four full Saturdays from 10am-5pm, (with reg­u­lar refresh­ment breaks). The train­ing will be held at the ECBA offices: 5 Rose Street  The dates of the work­shops will be:

Saturday 12th February
Saturday 26th February
Saturday 12th March
Saturday 26th March

Registration and Attendance
You can attend just some or all of the work­shops, as long as you let ECBA know in advance which ones you plan to attend.  To register for the course:
email courses@ecba.org.uk, or call 0131 248 2698

For more inform­a­tion see the ECBA web­site — www.ecba.org.uk

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Posted in Courses, events, gardening