After The Rain

Welcome to our garden newsletter!

📅EVENTS AT THE GARDEN

🍂Saturday, 28th February, 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm - Family Nature Connection session with Jane, a perfect event for families to slow down, explore, and enjoy meaningful time together outdoors » TICKETS 

🌾Sunday, 1st March, 11:00 am to 2:00 pm - Guildford Seed Swap - Trinity Centre, GU1 3RR - INFO

🥄Sunday, 8th March, 11:00 am to 3:00 pm - Bodgers Day in the Hub - Closed group, please get in touch with Guildford Spoon Carvers for details

🌱Saturday, 14th March, 10:00 am to 12:00 pm - Introduction to Gardening Workshop (Part 1) with Lynne and Clare - email: [email protected]

🌿Wednesday, 25th March, 7:00 pm - Zero AGM - Further details via Zero

🍂Save the Date - Saturday, 2nd May, 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm - Family Nature Connection session with Jane - A perfect event for families to slow down, explore and enjoy meaningful time together outdoors - email: [email protected] for info.

🌍EVENTS AT ZERO GUILDFORD » CLICK

🐌GARDEN UPDATE

by Clare Millington

Although January and February have been pretty wet, it’s good to get it off its chest and top up the water tables, ponds and butts ready for the summer. Some welcome sunshine and warmth have set the birds tweeting and the signs of spring are everywhere. The cherry trees and blackthorn are coming into flower, there are catkins on the willow, and we've got something spicy popping up in the forest garden!

Clue 1: It arrives quietly in late winter.
Clue 2: It loves dappled shade and woodland edges.
Clue 3: Crush a leaf gently between your fingers and it gives itself away.
Clue 4: In a few weeks, it will be carpeting the ground with starry white flowers.
Clue 5: It’s delicious in pesto, soups and butter!

Community

I’ve been thinking about the true meaning of community gardens, and it’s been interesting visiting local projects and hearing their stories and visions. I realise that each project is unique. Some are purely for wellbeing through growing and the joy of being outside together. Some focus on growing and providing local food, and some offer education opportunities.

This network of projects is also a wider connection for community. Sharing ideas and resources with each other takes us back to a time when we bartered and swapped, and money wasn’t the objective.

This month

We donated our amazing willow wands to the Ripley Nature Reserve for their hedge laying, and Glenda, who made us our beautiful stained glass bee.

I helped out at the Garden House Project and learned valuable pruning skills for our orchard. I’ve also came away with some beautiful coloured willow to plant at Rosamund.

Farncombe Community Garden shared valuable advice about how they started and designed their lovely space, and we will donate willow for their woven fences.

We now have a source of woodchip supplied by a local tree surgeon, Angus in Chilworth, and manure from Amanda’s horses next door.

Rob Stringer will supply our tree stakes from his coppice nearby in exchange for some tomato plants.

Clandon Wood Natural Burial has donated all the clay for our Hub building.

Wassail

The Wassail event was a really successful afternoon of dancing, singing and blessing the orchard, led by the fantastic forager, spoon carver and wassailer Sue Webber in her crimson robes.

Sue invited some members of her Shakti Singers choir, who sang to us in the Hub (video here) while we ate the delicious cakes supplied by our DofE bakers.

We had a good turnout and it was lovely to see people from 9 to 90 enjoying the fun. Shin supplied enormous marshmallows for toasting, which went down a treat with the youngsters.

Big thanks to all who came and contributed.

Seed Swap

We’ve saved lots of lovely seeds from the garden last year, so do go along to the Guildford seed swap on Sunday. There will be lots of interesting local seeds to buy and swap.

Orchard

We enjoyed a lovely sunny afternoon pruning our fruit trees. Last year they were damaged by rabbits, so we decided to let them recover and didn’t prune. Consequently, there was a lot of new growth to sort out. We had a good turnout to reshape the trees and mulch them with a mix of manure and woodchips

Surrey County Council donated three pear tree saplings for our orchard, which we planted and mulched, and the DofE students knocked up some great signs.

With the Wassail and all this attention, hopefully we’ll have another bumper crop this autumn.

What’s occurring in the fruit cage

Kate has done a great job of pruning the currants, grapes and berries, and they’re all budding away in the fruit cage.

Last year we noticed that the autumn fruiting raspberries that hadn’t been pruned, runners that had escaped the cage, all fruited much earlier in the summer. Kate has carried out an experiment and tried a mixture of pruning approaches to hopefully get a longer cropping season, so watch this space for results.

We’ve also decided to plant some kales and brassicas in the cage where there are gaps, to protect them from birds and caterpillars. We’ll plant a mix of perennial kale and broccoli, along with some annual curly kale.

Groups

Our growing community of group members is thriving, from the resident Guildford Spoon Carvers to the young people from RGS and GHS sixth form, Pond Meadow SEND School, and Nudge Education working one-to-one with children to experience nature.

The Growth Team from Surrey Choices have spent the winter tree popping in the meadows.

Other News

Clare has secured funding from SCC Your Fund and Mark Brown, joint owner of the site, to pay for a Certificate in Community Orchard course through The Orchard Project. This will qualify her to run workshops at the garden and provide support for other orchard projects.

Lynne from Zero will be running a series of four workshops at the garden to teach beginners how to grow from seed to harvest. This will be a low-cost course and will cover most aspects of organic growing. People can either book individual days or the whole course.

Margaret is sourcing native plants and seeds for the bog garden and pond margins, so we’ll be arranging some planting dates in the next couple of months.

We’ll also be offering some free cobbing workshops this spring, so watch out for these great opportunities to learn how to build with cob and meet new people.

🐮LOOKERING

by Sarah Davies

A beautiful, cold, but sunny spring day saw some of the 'Lookerer' volunteers head out and help Surrey Wildlife Trust put up the next lot of electric fencing, to help protect the Belties and Sheep as they graze the next set of fields at Pewley and Rosamund Meadows. Thanks, Lucy at SWT, the tea and biscuits helped to keep us going!

👩🏻‍🌾MARCH JOBS AT THE GARDEN

• Mulch beds with compost

• Start to sow seeds in poly 2

• Clear brambles and scrub around trees

• Make dead hedge edging

• Use woodchip to top up paths and on trellis area

🌿PLANT OF THE MONTH - LESSER CELANDINE

by Helen Harris

Description

With glossy, dark-green and heart-shaped leaves with long stalks and shiny, yellow star-like flowers with eight to twelve petals, lesser Celandine is a cheerful harbinger of spring found throughout the United Kingdom. It can be found in woodlands, hedgerows riverbanks, and meadows from February to May. It is a member of the buttercup family, not to be confused with Greater Celandine, which is poppy family. Lesser celandine is not a geophyte (a plant with a bulb – e.g. snowdrop) like most other very early emerging flowers, however it does have a cluster of small tubers at the stem base which explains how it manages to regrow and flower so early in the year. 

Ecology

Lesser celandine is an important early nectar source for pollinators such as bees and hoverflies. The plant thrives in moist, shady environments and often forms dense carpets, which help stabilise soil and prevent erosion along waterways.

Medicinal Uses

Lesser celandine has a notable history of medicinal use in the UK, particularly for the treatment of haemorrhoids—hence its alternative name, pilewort. Traditional herbalists would prepare ointments and poultices from the plant's roots, which contain saponins and tannins believed to soothe inflammation and promote healing. Incidentally, the shape of these tubers explains lesser celandine’s other common name: pilewort. The tubers mentioned above were also considered to resemble that of haemorrhoids or piles. Under the ancient ‘doctrine of signatures’, God was held to have marked each species to indicate its use to humans, so this resemblance was considered a sure fire sign that celandine would cure piles.

Folklore

William Wordsworth, the famed Romantic poet, was so taken by its golden blooms that he penned several poems in its honour, even requesting the flower be carved on his tombstone. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, celandine carpets the land when Aslan is resurrected and the eternal winter ends.  In rural superstition, some believed it could predict the weather: if the flowers closed before midday, rain was expected. Others associated it with luck and fertility, incorporating the blooms into spring celebrations or using them to decorate homes for protection and prosperity.

Sources: 

Woodland Trust Wildlife Trust Forest Garden

🎟️JOINING INFO

https://www.guildfordcommunitygarden.org.uk/

We look forward to seeing you in the garden soon!