The Granton Community Gardeners have recently been awarded funding from the Edinburgh Lothian Greenspace Trust.

With the onset of Spring the garden has proved a challenge for the volunteers. There has been a lot to do preparing for planting and developing new spaces as the garden expands, so a little help was needed.

Granton volunteer Tom Kirby submitted a funding application to the Edinburgh Lothian Greenspace Trust to help with the hire of tools to tackle the heavy-duty work. As hale and hearty as the volunteers are, serious gardening needs things like rotavators and turf cutters to get on top of things. So Tom wrote to the trust to ask for their help funding the hire cost of the heavy gear, as well as to purchase more tools and seeds for the new season.

The trust has kindly agreed to provide £750 toward the cost which means the team in Granton can now really get to grips with the garden and take another step towards building a sustainable community.

It’s a busy time for the Granton Community Gardeners. Now that spring is here there’s a lot to do sowing seeds and digging over.

The gardeners are currently working on a sowing plan to make the most of their land and get a varied crop come harvest time. Plans have been drawn up to raise some of the plant beds and build several paths through the gardens.

Now that the gardens are established, the group are trying to expand the network and build its capacity. Over the last few weeks they have been reaching out to other members of the community and hope to include local schools and associations, as well as consulting other Granton residents on possible future expansion of the gardens to include other sites.

As part of the expansion, the group have started to look for funding opportunities. They want to develop the project further and broaden its impact, and to do this they will need to find a little funding. Identifying priorities and developing the skills needed to take action on them is an essential part of community-led development.

Environmental issues have been at the fore for the last few weeks. Pipes have been leaking into some of the gardens spaces and polluting the community spaces. Environmental sustainability is at the heart of the project as it aims to demonstrate its potential as an alternative approach to urban land use. To this end the group has put renewed focus on its green efforts and is looking at ways to make the gardens safe for a vibrant wildlife.

As well as being environmentally sustainable, the aim is to make the project financially sustainable by growing enough food to sell on the local market. In order to do this the group is working on a business plan and has taken its first steps to market themselves through the Granton Library. There are a lot of ambitions for the future and they want to recruit some volunteers with expertise in areas like business, marketing and web-design, not to mention a few more stout labourers.

If you would like more information, or would like to get involved, you can contact us at info@sead.org.uk

From the 16th May please change your contact details for us to…

SEAD (Scottish Education and Action for Development)
Norton Park
57 Albion Road
Edinburgh
EH7 5QY
t: ++44131 475 2612

All other details will stay the same

Take action before the RBS AGM!

Join our photo petition today by sending a message to RBS to stop investing our money in companies extracting oil from tar sands.

Submit your photo to the RBS photo petition today in three easy steps:

• 1. Write your message on paper, your body, your bank card…
• 2. Take a photo of you and your message
• 3. Email the photo to gone32hint@photos.flickr.com

And in 5 or so minutes your photo will appear below.

Please try to reduce the size on the picture to below 1Mb before you email it, there are many ways but an easy guide to doing this is here (for XP) or here (for Vista).

We will be bringing these photos to the RBS AGM so please send us your photo by 18 April 2011, the evening before the RBS AGM.

Vote NO to tar sands at the ‘People’s AGM’

Monday 18 April, 7-9pm, Edinburgh University

Indigenous people in Canada are fighting ‘the most destructive project on earth’ – the extraction of oil from tar sands and the building of a super-pipeline through their ancestral lands.  RBS is financing companies mining tar sands and planning the pipeline.

Hear powerful first-hand accounts of the destruction caused by tar sands extraction and the fight to stop the Enbridge pipeline, and help stop RBS making it worse with our money.

Read the rest of RBS : Back to Black …