A year at story garden

It’s tempting to brush last year under the carpet and pretend it didn’t happen.

But there have been some important discoveries, or rediscoveries and it would be wrong not to celebrate them! Almost everyone I’ve talked to this year has said that in 2020 we learnt the importance of green space and spent most of our time yearning for reconnection with nature outdoors. Green space has been a lifeline for us inner city Londoners, where we mostly live in small homes with no gardens. Parks and gardens have given our bodies and our minds space to unwind and recharge. They’ve been the place where we can have our one hour of exercise or say hello to friends and family safely.

Story Garden has been one of those green spaces and this blog is a reflection of the journey the garden has taken this year.

Bringing the Garden Home

In March, the garden was shut for 5 weeks as we all tried our best to stay at home. Almost all projects were paused or reinvented whilst most of the team had to be furloughed. The few of us who remained working would cycle to the garden to keep the plants watered and alive and seeds sown. But it weighed very heavily for the garden to be closed and to know that so many households in Somers Town were being deprived of nature and keeping everyone safe at the expense of their physical and mental health.

We wanted to bring the Story Garden garden home in whatever small way we could and found a number of ways to do this. We made our Stay at Home Garden activity pack, five beautiful issues, which capture the spirit of the nature connection work we do with children, young people and adults of all ages.

And we created seed packs, house plant packs and DIY planter packs so that the families and households that we work with could have some food growing and plants to care for in their home. 

From farm to fork

For a 2 acre sized garden the total square meterage of space used for growing was small at the start of 2020, the garden was only 6 months old so this wasn’t a big surprise. The pandemic gave us the drive we needed to expand how much we grow food in. With two foodbanks quickly scaling up right next door we knew that the fresh nutritious veg we could grow at Story Garden would go a long way. We quickly knocked together 8 long beds and scrapped the growing plan for the year in favour of fast growing leafy greens, beans and other suitable veg.

In May, with safe systems and a cleaning schedule in place, the garden was open for the local Growing groups to come back and look after the vegetables growing in their own beds. It was an extremely happy moment.

And at the same time we were able to have a few local volunteers support the production of veg for the foodbank. Over 9 months we harvested 260kgs of vegetables. A small contribution to the huge effort to create food security in Somers Town but one that took us by surprise and drives us to produce even more in 2021!

In all of this it wasn’t just the food growing that filled us with optimism but the new connections we made - at a distance! Seeing neighbours wave to each other from their growing beds and meeting community workers in Somer Town working tirelessly to alleviate some of the hardship - these were moments that have given us much needed hope and inspiration in 2020.

Greening Somers Town

Having thought in March that all chances of supporting neighbourhood food growing in Somers Town was out of the question, it was a huge pleasure to meet the Goldington Estate TRA and help revive their growing group. Over 10 weeks we worked together with over 15 neighbours to rebuild the dilapidated growing beds, add tonnes of soil and create a new self managed growing group. Their transformed growing space and growing group is a flagship for a blossoming community of growing spaces to come in 2021.

Despite not being able to hold regular face to face meetings, the Big Local Greening Committee worked together through Autumn 2020 to launch the Green Fund - offering up to £3000 to up to 15 local groups of neighbours who want to transform spaces in their estates into green growing patches. The committee, which is resident led and chaired by me with support from Community Gardener, Sharin, meets early in 2021 to decide on the successful applications. Expect to see a flurry of greening activity this Summer in pockets of space all over the neighbourhood, I can’t wait.

Youth Voices

The garden isn’t complete without the voice of young people, bursting with excitement and huge ambitions. Moving school online, to screens that we are already unhealthily glued to, has been disruptive and yet young people have shown their resilience and made the best of the situation. However, at the garden we’re not short of outdoor space and so have hardened ourselves up and ran almost all of our sessions entirely outside this year - we are so grateful to be able to do this.

Family Saturdays might be the project we are most proud to have been able to run non stop since May. We have found ways to have up to 10 families every Saturday involved in our workshops while making sure everyone was safe. We adapted almost monthly to the changing guidance and rules and by the end of 2020 we found our way to a new rhythm - self led play. Family Saturdays is centred around child-led play but we now find that it is play for parents too and it has been beautiful to see families working together to create their own playgrounds from junk and unused materials such as tyres, planks of wood, old gutters. The imagination behind this has been James, doing his graduate residency at Make @ Story Garden and it’s been special to see our families grow even more this year as a result of the Loose Parts Play project.

Keeping the fire burning

A new lockdown in November and a new question of how this garden can serve the community in this darker and colder month. The answer happened without us really releasing it had happened. We lit a fire. We let our neighbours know the fire was burning. Over November and December people drifted to the warm fire daily, to sit and stare, to melt their own marshmallows, to do a bit of stretching. It was a reminder that sometimes the smallest gestures can have the biggest impact.

As 2020 came to a close the pull to give gifts, to offer out warmth and care to each other, never felt stronger. And we all know a frazzled parent for whom the Winter holiday means hyper children, stuck inside with nothing to do and lots of energy. We revisited our Stay at Home Garden kits and revisioned them. We made over 100 winter kits full of crafts for families to make with each other and then gift to each other. A weaving kit, a felt bird kit and a DIY planter kit which would (we hope!!) keep the children occupied for a few hours over the dark and cold days.

We also had 40 Take and Make recipe boxes from Kitchen Social and lots and lots of crafts and art supplies and books from the Mayor’s office. We said goodbye to 2020 and to the garden on Saturday 19th December with lots of smiles and excitement.

Learning

Staying connected with each other - we are so much stronger as community organisations and charities, and our work is deeper and more efficient when we work together.

Food is at the heart of of our communities - And when the status quo is radically disrupted we get a chance to see how it could be and think bigger and be more ambitious. Dignity and choice, solidarity not charity and building a real green economy in Somers Town that includes, training, entry level work and lifting voices that have been marginalised is the most important thing.

Breath, pause, adapt and let change happen - There’s no doubt it was exhausting to reinvent our projects and systems in the garden every couple of weeks and months. But taking a moment to let that sink in, let go of the way we wanted things to be and remember to pace ourselves. Not that we always achieved this but the intention was there :)

Fire - Like moths to a flame, It’s what brings us together in colder months. Who needs a TV when you’ve got a warm orange fire!

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Notes from the Garden