As it says in the footer on the website, the Hope Garden is “Funded by Local Places for Nature, delivered by National Lottery Heritage Fund in partnership with the Welsh Government“
And what we’re doing is to create that local place with low-cost materials, that local place being a canvas shelter with a storage unit for benches and to hang up coats. It‘s an outdoor classroom, a workshop space, a social gathering out-of-the-rain refuge for the allotmenteers. And all of these uses are focussed around learning about wildlife.
Outdoor well-being workshop run by BlueGreenCymru
The school is running workshops aligned with the Grassland Nature ID project, and will hopefully use the space on a regular basis. They also helped design the space too, with a design workshop last year, and they‘ll be running the IntMintMint Challenge too with the hex beds.
Ysgol Cilgerran students gather around ecologist Yusef Samari at the Hope Gardne wildlife ID workshop
Mint Mint Hex Beds
I would like to run forest garden workshops later in the year, to bring some money in to cover running costs of Garden Wild Plants CIC.
We‘re very lucky to have Phil Blackwood from BlueGreenCymru building the canvas shelter; they run numerous well-being outdoor workshops, so are ideally positioned to know what is required from the space.
The plan is to have plans under the toolkit section, so that the low-cost canvas shelter and pallet storage unit can be easily built by other community groups.
Here‘s a screenshot of the PDF for the canvas shelter (it’s still a work in progress!)
The canvas shelter PDF on the Hope Garden repository
And here‘s a screenshot of the CAD I’ve creatd for the storage unit made out of pallets, stakes and Corroline roofing sheets:
Basic but functional
I feel bad because originally the storage unit was going to be a beautiful round wood structure with a green roof made by the very talented woodworker David Hunter. But it was just too expensive, in time and materials, so I‘ve asked him to make something far more prosaic.