SEAD (Scottish Education and Action for Development)

This weekend the Granton Community Gardeners are welcoming visitors for two days of planting, pruning and digging over.

The gardens are open from 12 to 3pm on Saturday the 28th and Sunday the 29th. Everyone is welcome and no gardening skills are required. Children need to be accompanied by an adult.

You can find the gardens on the corner of Wardieburn Road and Boswell Parkway.

We hope to see you there!

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.

SEAD has joined the End Tax Haven Secrecy campaign which aims to achieve global tax transparency for the benefit of the world’s poor. The campaign is a coalition of like-minded organisations from around the world that work to influence governments, policy and to raise awareness of unfair tax practices.

Read more…

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

This video takes a look at the community food intiatives that SEAD supported as part of the NET Your Carbons project.