Bedfords Park Walled Garden

Spring and Summer Mean New Folks in the Garden!

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It’s springtime, possibly the best time to enjoy the garden! We’ve got a great handful of new partnerships bringing even more people out to enjoy the fresh air – plus some great updates! Check it all out below.

Every Monday the Special Educational Needs (SEN) unit from Drapers Academy come out to participate in Grow>Cook>Eat. They have their own special patch in the garden where we’ve planted vegetables to teach healthy eating habits. These young environmental enthusiasts are learning about the elements through hands on play and outside adventure.

Our friends at Havering Mind continue to visit the garden every Wednesday for their “Live a Better Life” programme. For 12 weeks they learn about the healthy food they’re planting, with special sessions that include crafting a sculpture in the garden. Anyone interested in joining can self-refer to the programme by contacting Havering Mind at liveabetterlife@haveringmind.org.uk. We’re starting up again in June, 2017!

Tapestry will also be enjoying the garden all summer starting in June! Every Friday a minibus picks up the older folks from around the borough and delivers them to the garden. Our focus is improving both health and wellbeing – physically and mentally. By being physically present in a natural environment amongst friends and friendly volunteers helps against social isolation. In addition to enjoying the outdoors, the garden staff will at Hopwa House in Hornchurch running workshops during Dementia Awareness week 15th – 19th May. It will be all about reminiscing with herbs and tending gardens.

The garden is part of Havering’s Dementia Action Alliance, the 2nd largest network in the country. The garden staff have been encouraging people with dementia and their carers to work in garden through the Alzheimer’s Society. We’re very proud that six of our dedicated volunteers have been trained in Dementia awareness and are now ‘Dementia Friends’.

 

We’re enjoy the sunny days and new growth in the garden. We’d love for you to come out and see it for yourself! We always welcome new volunteers to our team. We also have a series of events coming up – find out more on our Events page or on Facebook!

Join us to celebrate Halloween!

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FREE EVENT

Dress up as witches & warlocks, elves, cats, pixies Saints and sinners to celebrate Halloween, Samhain or All Souls Day. Card and psychic readings and all things mystical.

There’ll be a real ale bar and warm yourself with the garden’s organic soup.

Stories and song around the big bonfire.

Plus some mystical magicary !

Tarot Is an ancient art going back maybe as far as ancient Egypt. On continental Europe they were used as playing cards but they are better known for their divination and spiritual guidance. £5 for 15 mins

+ Mimosa has been reading Tarot for 12 years and loves meeting and guiding people along their path

+ Priti is a Shamanic Healer and a Tarot Reader and has been doing this work all her life. She chose to take this to a professional level 14 years ago. She loves what she does and is clear that her path is to help people to live their own empowering, fulfilling and inspiring life. You can contact her at priti_chouhan@yahoo.co.uk or 07534654523.

Palmistry and Crystal Ball readings

+ Witchy Ways will grace us with her presence for some palmistry and crystal ball readings. She’ll be bringing some trinkets too including blessing bags for health , wealth, love and protection.

+ And the Master of potions and brews will descend upon us with mixtures and tinctures for medicine, illumination and some hocus pocus mixed in!

Bring torches & candles! It will be pitch black!

See who else is coming and tell us if you’re coming on our facebook page.

Celebrate our harvest at the Harvest Festival

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Unfortunately the lovely summer months have passed but, on the positive side, this also means it’s harvest time!
As we’ve made more and more space ready for growing this year, we’re expecting to break our own harvest records. Time to celebrate this at our (yearly) Harvest Festival!

This year’s festival takes place on Saturday 26 September from 12pm to 6pm. Entrance is free, as well as most activities. We’ll have loads of health and wellbeing activities on offer, such as acupuncture, Reiki & crystal healing, basic yoga and much more. We’ll be doing historic tours of the garden and there’ll be activities for children as well.

For those of you who want to have a taste of our lovely vegetables we’ll have organic garden soup AND we will be selling our produce. All proceeds will be re-invested in the garden!

Check the event page for the full programme.

Garden secure for next 3 years

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It’s with great excitement that we can now reveal that we’ve been given a grant from the Big Lottery Reaching Communities Fund. The grant amounts to almost £333,000 and will sustain the main part of our work for the next 3 years.

Our focus is, as it always has been, to restore the Georgian walled garden into a community focused food growing hub. With this grant we can now we can further develop the training and development opportunities for our communities focusing on improving health and well-being.

There are a number of activities for beneficiary groups already outlined and the deatails will be published shortly, these are:

The Grow>Cook>Eat programme for children 8-12 is a holistic approach to teaching about healthy eating. It will start again in the summer holidays 2015 and be expanded to the autumn half term 2015, Easter 2016, half term in May 2016 and so on. A Grow>Cook>Eat Saturday club will also start in September 2015.

An over 50’s club will begin in the spring. This is a monthly club based around horticulture and will provide workshops and training for everyone. It’s also a place of community and socialising for people over a cup of tea. This will be a members club and hopefully will meet more often as the membership grows.

It’s planned to provide City and Guilds training separately to 2 groups of beneficiaries; unemployed people and young adults with learning difficulties. The certificate offered will be ‘skills for working life’ horticulture to begin with.

We’re also intending to teach young offenders the basics of horticulture as they do there community service with us. Other projects will arise for them too.

And of course we’ll continue the volunteering days on Tuesdays and Thursdays, run events and festivals and have a lot of fun doing it !

At the end of the grant period, 2018 we will be handing the management of the garden over to community management. We don’t know what form this will take yet. A new Project Board is being set up to lead this as well as monitor and lead the activities of the garden project. Organisations that link with the garden will be invited to be a partner and member of the Board.

Looking forward to seeing you in the garden!

Clear Village organises summer programme for school children

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Clear Village Charitable Trust, the organisation that manages the Walled Garden, has been commissioned by Havering Council to run a programme for children during the summer holidays 2014. The programme will start on July 29th and will run for five weeks until August 29th, with the Grow Cook Eat festival as a closing event on September 6th.

Children are invited to take part in a playful, inventive and unique experience of discovery about food – how to grow it, how to cook some of it but more importantly they’ll learn about how food affects their bodies and gain knowledge that should last a lifetime.

It takes place in the garden with food growing all around them. So they’ll see vegetables in a different light. They may not even recognise familiar vegetables growing in the ground and new vegetables will be an exciting all round encounter.