Veg on the Edge is expanding… Green fingers needed!

Want to grow your own organic veg? Get your wellies muddy? Meet your neighbours and have a laugh? If so, Veg on the Edge needs you!

We are expanding at both our current sites: the Sunday School Garden in Caroline Street car park, and Platform 1 at Saltaire Rail Station. We’re adding more raised beds to the ones we’ve already established, thanks to the support of Shipley College and Sustainable Saltaire.

We’re also developing two brand new sites: one on upper Caroline Street overlooking the railway line, and another outside the Jonathan Silver Building at Shipley College. There’ll be plenty of new growing space, so there’s even more opportunity to get involved.

We’re planning all sorts of wonderful crops, from edible flowers to Peruvian purple potatoes and now’s the time to get involved and help us sow!

From Wednesday 30 March we’ll be reinstating our weekly Wednesday evening session from 6pm to 7pm at the Sunday School Garden. For those of you that can’t make a weekday, we also meet here on the first Sunday of the month throughout the year from 11am to 12pm. You don’t need to make any special commitment … just come along as and when you want. Everyone is welcome, whatever your age or ability.

In addition, we’d love members to join our veg task force to help plan our activities and raise funds. If you’d like to be involved, come along to one of our friendly fortnightly meetings. Our next get together will be on Thursday 24 March at 7pm, upstairs at Fanny’s Ale House. Whether you want to get involved with planning and planting, or simply meet a few new people and chat about vegetables over a pint, you are very welcome to come along and join in.

Drop us a line at hello@vegontheedge.org if you’d like to come along or find out more.

New growing site and change to meeting times

The seasons are changing and there’s a crispness in the air! It’s time to hunker down and prepare for winter. But things aren’t going too quiet at Veg on the Edge.

We’re very excited to announce a sister site to the Sunday School Garden. Located at Saltaire railway station, the new site will be called Veg on the Edge at Platform 1, in association with Shipley College. We’ll be growing a range of edible plants for the raised bed just by the entrance to the platform. We’d love you to come along and join in.

We’ve also got a new winter timetable. Now the nights have drawn in, we’ve ended our Wednesday evening gardening sessions. However there’s still lots to do during winter, so we’ll continue to meet on the first Sunday of every month from 11am to 12pm. We’ll be tidying up the beds and gradually rotating the contents. We’ve already started planting out winter crops like kale, chard and rocket, and there’s more to go in. We’ll also be collecting any seeds for next year.

Do come along on:

Sunday 1 November

Sunday 6 December

Sunday 3 January

Sunday 7 February

Finally, we’re organising a tasty little programme of walks, talks and making activities, so we can get together during the cold months. We’ll share the details on the blog as soon as we know more or sign up to our newsletter to get an update by email.

Phew. No chance of hibernating!

Great Feedback at Saltaire Festival Open Gardens

We had a wonderful weekend at the Saltaire Festival as part of the Open Gardens trail. It was lovely to meet so many people interested in the Sunday School Garden in Caroline Street car park. Thanks to everyone who generously donated to our home-made cake stall or filled in a survey. It was lovely to get feedback on what we’ve been doing, what people would like to see, and how they might get involved.

Here’s a flavour of the comments we received:

“Keep up the good work!”

“Thank you for improving this location, it’s fab!”

“Brilliant idea”

“We really enjoy walking past the garden and talking to our children about the vegetables”

“Big respect for what you’re doing!”

Everyone we met agreed that they’d like to see more community growing spaces in Saltaire. We’re currently well on the way to developing projects for further sites, so that more of us can get involved and help make our neighbourhood even better. We’ll post more updates on this soon as we can.

We also heard that it’s difficult for some people to escape work in time for our regular Wednesday 6pm session. Starting in November, we’ll be adding an extra session on the first Sunday of the month at 11am, so that more folks can join us. Just turn up and muck in. The perfect way to work up an appetite for your Sunday roast!

Say hello at Saltaire Open Gardens 2015

We’re delighted to be taking part in this year’s Saltaire Open Gardens, during the opening weekend of Saltaire Festival 2015.

We’ll be on site at the Sunday School Community Food Garden at the Caroline Street car park from 12.00pm to 4.30pm on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September. Do drop by to say hello and take a look at what we’ve been growing this year. We’re really keen to get feedback about the garden from people living in the area and hear your views on local community growing. There’ll also be some tasty treats available for anyone who’d like to make a donation to the project!

To read more about the opening weekend of Saltaire Festival you can download this year’s trail leaflet here featuring the garden and sculpture trail as well as the Makers’ Fair and pop up houses: Saltaire Festival 2015 Opening Weekend

We’re on the move!

Hello fellow growers,

The evenings are getting lighter, Spring is in the air, and Veg on the Edge is on the move.

We recently met with the lovely folks at Taste of Saltaire, a project set up and run by Sustainable Saltaire. We were truly inspired by their transformation of a scrubby bit of land by the Caroline Street car park into a thriving food growing space.

We’ve offered to support Taste of Saltaire in maintaining the Caroline Street site, and will be working alongside them at their regular drop-in sessions on Wednesday evenings at 6pm. From here we hope to work together to identify and develop other similar sites in the locality, small or large.

We’re also continuing discussions with a number of landowners and potential partners in the area. We haven’t yet given up on our quest for a substantial site to develop an urban community food garden in Shipley/Saltaire.

In the meantime, enjoy the April sun and showers. If you’re passing by the Caroline Street site on a Wednesday evening, do stop and say hello!

Giving a helping hand to Hirst Wood Regeneration

Whilst Veg on the Edge are continuing to look for opportunities to develop a community food garden in the Shipley area, we are also eager to get our hands dirty and help out with some of the other fantastic growing projects happening locally.

Volunteers get stuck in at the HWRG working party

On Saturday 1 November we were pleased to join a working party led by Hirst Wood Regeneration Group (HWRG), who are trying to transform an unloved site next to Hirst Lock into a nature reserve. The event was very well attended, with lots of support from local residents who helped to clear the site in order that more planting can continue. The developing reserve is in a lovely spot close to the canal, and we recommend you take a look at the fantastic work being done by HWRG, or better still get involved!

What’s happening: Summer 2014

Last October when we held our Information Sharing Day, we had pictured ourselves hard at work this summer in our community food garden, planting, harvesting and enjoying the fruits of our labours.

However, as you will be aware this is not the case. In previous newsletters we outlined our plans to bid to WREN for funds to develop the land. We require this funding because we need significant infrastructure to cap the site before we can safely work the land, due to the soil’s poor quality and contaminaion. To grant funding WREN require a minimum 7-year lease from Bradford Council.

Unfortunately after much negotiation, Bradford Council has declined to grant this, offering at most a 2-year lease. Their main reason for this is the uncertainty surrounding the future of the Fire Station. At some time in the future the Fire Station may move elsewhere, and the land might be sold for development. The land next to the Fire Station – our proposed site – could be part and parcel of any deal.

Proposed site of Veg on the Edge community food garden, to the rear of the Fire Station on Saltaire Road

Obviously, this is very frustrating. We are totally committed to this project and have worked hard to make it a reality, already overcoming a number of hurdles. So to be stalled by something that may or may not happen some time in the future is very disappointing.

But we are not giving up. We believe Veg on the Edge is a great project and we know there is still a lot of local support to see it realised. Sarah, our Chair, recently met with
Councillor Andrew Thornton (Executive Member BMDC, responsible for Environment, Sport and Sustainability) on site to explain our position. Cllr Thornton has now decided to wait until the position on the Fire Station becomes clearer before reconsidering the leasing options. There is no timescale to this so we shall have to wait and see.

In the meantime our green fingers are itchy to get into the soil, so we are starting to look for alternative sites, which might be suited to an adapted or interim version of our design. Our first points of contact will be social housing provider Incommunities, and Saltaire World Heritage Site.

If you have any suggestions for other stakeholders that we might contact, or you’ve noticed some unloved wasteground nearby that could be transformed into a community food garden, we would love to hear from you.

We’re still looking for enthusiastic people to join our regular meetings to help make our vision happen – if that sounds like you, please do drop us a line.

Enjoy the rest of the summer, and we’ll be back in touch with more updates in the autumn.

What’s happening: Spring 2014

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 during soil testing

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!

What’s happening: December 2013

It seems like ages since we got together on that wonderfully sunny Sunday in October at our Information Sharing Day. Since then there has been a hive of activity across the VotE team and we are working hard to make our dream of a community food garden a reality.

Inevitably there are lots of steps that need to be taken before we can put spade to ground, so here’s an update on what’s been going on behind the scenes:

Funding
We have been doing lots of research into funding, and are now working towards submitting a substantial funding bid in 2014, as well as several smaller ones. As you can imagine, there is a huge amount of detailed information we need to provide to funders, so we are beavering away on all the elements that need to be in place before we can push the button.

Soil Testing
A big thank you to Russell, our soil-tester in shining armour who came along to the Information Sharing Day and offered his much-needed professional support. If you have lived in the area for some time you may be aware that the site has a varied history and was once a quarry, so the lab results of the soil tests will help shape the final garden design.

Lease
We are also indebted to the wonderful Shubhu, a lawyer we met through our Information Sharing Day, who is guiding us on the development of a lease with landowners Bradford Metropolitan District Council.

Garden Design
Thanks to some great feedback from local residents on our initial plans, we can now move forward to create a more detailed Master Plan that will specify all the features and materials we would like to include.

In early December we invited respondents that had expressed an interest in how the garden would be composed to attend a Garden Design sub-group meeting. A number of brave souls gave up their Sunday morning to discuss the merits of cloches and bark chippings, supported by muffins and much needed coffee. The sub-group all have homework to do over Christmas, and will get back together in early January to finalise the design brief. Shortly after we hope to have more funding in place to enable us to work again with BCEP to translate these ideas into detailed professional plans.

Coming Next
The Garden Design sub-group is the first VotE sub-group to have met, but as the project develops rest assured that if you have expressed an interest in a particular aspect we will be inviting you to take part – from fundraising, garden design, community links, communications, and events there is plenty to do – so we look forward to seeing you again in the New Year.

In the meantime, check back in to this website to see what we’ve been up to, or follow us on Twitter @VegOnTheEdge or our Facebook page – your tweets and comments are very much appreciated.

Consultation Survey Results

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!

Veg On The Edge

Community food growing in Saltaire, West Yorkshire