VOs and midweek group at Inverness have just finished a 2 week stint in Forres, giving the courtyard garden at Forres academy a much needed makeover… in addition to general weeding and tidy up we constructed a compost bin from recycled materials (Jenny’s shed!), raised beds, a wall as seating for outdoor teaching (see picture) and planted a ‘birds and insect corner’. We were enthusiastically helped throughout by some of the school’s pupils, members of the school garden group. There are always unexpected minor difficulties in a project of this scale: at Forres they were mostly stone related! Most of the beds turned out to have only a thin layer of soil covering a thick layer of decorative pebble, which made digging rather tedious! Building the wall was made more challenging by poor quality (wrong shaped) stone from the quarry…but this was no problem for George, the master waller. Lastly…there must be some mention of the epic rock moving exercise…four people and some ingenuity was required to move three very large decorative boulders! Other notably points of the weeks, in no particular order, were a visit from the Forres weekly press, deflating airbeds, Dave’s drain, and longwinded darts matches.
It was hard work, but the end result was worth it!
