Sunday 17th March 2024

A key feature of the Local Places for Nature Capital Fund is the emphasis on capital.

Every successful garden and nature reserve relies upon long-term management and maintenance, but funding for this is not available from the Capital Fund.

Instead, Gardd Gobaith Cilgerran Hope Garden will have to rely upon volunteers.

The co-design process, along the principles of a Community Assembly, is essential in both enabling and involving volunteers for the long-term. If the features are incorporated into the infrastructure of the project—for example, a mother bed of rare perennial vegetables for allotmenteers, or an outdoor wildlife laboratory for the primary school—then the incentives for volunteer involvement increase dramatically.

Without a maintenance budget, it is very difficult at this stage to accurately provide a maintenance plan, because it really depends on specific and committed long-term volunteers, which will only become evident during the co-design process.

In the short-term, ie 2-3 years, project lead Jake Rayson will be providing maintenace as he lives locally.

Low-maintenance wildlife forest garden

A key feature of a wildlife forest garden is that it is low-maintenance by design. There is perennial ground cover which minimises the amount of weeding.

The maintenance is front-loaded, as the most weeding (mostly grass, opportunistic annuals, Bramble, Docks etc) is in the first 3 years whilst the perennial ground cover gets established.

The other key maintenance is pruning fruit trees, which needs to be done in the 3rd year.

Long-term, the key maintenance tasks are keeping the canvas and timber structures in good repair, annual fruit tree pruning, minimal weeding and harvesting the crops. Hopefully, a resilient enough volunteer group will be able to take on these tasks.