The evening’s are lighter, there’s blossom on the trees and a spring in everyone’s step. Time to update you on Veg on the Edge and our progress!

Digging around
In January we received the report from the professionals who undertook our soil testing. At first reading it was a bit daunting. Trial pits on site revealed rather a large number of cobbles and stones – not very spade friendly, let alone veg-friendly – and the soil itself contained traces of ash, clinker, unwanted chemicals, and other nasties.

One of 8 trial pits dug to investigate the ground condition and take samples for testing

Of course, this should be no surprise given the site’s chequered past as a former quarry, YWCA hostel, day nursery, and even (rumoured) an air-raid shelter. However, this presented us with the challenge of finding a way to ensure the food garden would be safe for all to use and grow.

After extensive talks with the friendly people at Curtins (the company who carried out the soil testing), Bradford Community Environment Project (BCEP) and officers at Bradford Council, all of whom have all been incredibly helpful, we have come up with a plan.

To cap it all
This is to cap the entire site with a super-durable geo-membrane and import clean, veg-friendly soil. This will then give us a long-lasting platform on which to create the community garden and make a safe environment in which to dig, work and play. The geo-membrane is estimated to last a minimum of a hundred years – plenty of time for us to harvest our rhubarb!

This is not a job for amateurs, so the next task is to unearth suitable contractors who can undertake this work for us, and to assess the costs before we submit bids to fund the whole project.

Magic beans
As you can imagine, until we resolved this challenge, we’ve had to slow down our progress in terms of seeking funding to make our vision happen. However, we’ve had very constructive initial discussions with our identified funder WREN . This is a not-for-profit business that awards grants for community, conservation and heritage projects.

We are planning to submit a bid to WREN for the majority of our costs, together with a number of smaller bids to other trusts and foundations. We are now in the process of negotiating a lease with Bradford Council that will make us eligible to apply for this funding.

This is where you come in! We are now looking for help with preparing our various bids for funding – and we’d prefer cash to magic beans. For those of you that have expressed an interest in supporting our funding endeavours, we will be in touch soon to invite you to a meeting to plan our next steps. If you think you might not be on this list, and have any experience of writing funding applications, securing sponsorship, preparing business plans or generally filling in forms, we would love to hear from you. Please contact Sarah at hello@vegontheedge.org to discuss how you could join our small-but-mighty taskforce.

Upwards and onwards
We have now gathered all your responses to the initial garden design presented at our Information Sharing Day back in October. Your views have been assimilated into a detailed materials specification and features brief, ready to go to BCEP to be transformed into the final Master Plan.

Phew. There have been a few ups and downs over the past months but they have made us more determined than ever to make our project work, and create a green oasis for the people of Shipley and Saltaire to share. Stubborn, eh?

Enjoy Spring and see you soon!

We were really pleased that 57 local residents completed surveys at our consultation event in October. The results have been very useful in helping us to understand more about how local people would like to use the space and why they might like to be involved in the community garden:

It was particularly interesting to see the enthusiasm for communal growing spaces, with 86% of respondents seeing these as essential. As a result we will definitely be creating shared areas, along with individual plots which are needed to encourage consistent use of the site.

Another important consideration for many respondents was the inclusion of wildlife areas, with nearly 90% seeing these as a crucial element of the garden. We aim to be considerate of wildlife across the site and will be providing dedicated areas to support local biodiversity and native planting such as the Bog Garden, Meadow Areas, Bird Feeding Stations and Nest Boxes.

Social areas also stood out as an important feature to many, with 80% viewing these as an essential part of the garden. The social aspect of the garden was also reflected in the reasons respondents’ gave for wanting to take part, with 80% stating that they would like to get to know their neighbours and local community better. This was coupled with a strong desire by 96% wanting to improve the environment of their local neighbourhood:

We are now using this data and other feedback to refine plans for the garden,  and it is also a brilliant basis to demonstrate the strong support for the garden to potential funders. Thank you again to everyone who came along and took part in the survey!

Following a successful application for Community First funding, VotE have been able to work with Bradford Community Environment Project (BCEP) to transform the group’s ideas into initial concept plans for the site. You can see these below, click on the image to see a larger version.

We launched these plans at our Information Sharing Day on Sunday 6 October, where they prompted lots of discussion about all the different possibilities. It was fantastic to receive such a positive response and we received some really useful feedback from nearby residents.

For those that couldn’t make this event we’d still love to hear from you.
Click here to complete this quick questionnaire to tell us what features are important to you and if you would like to become involved in creating or using the food garden.