The Kilbirnie Green Gym group were faced with a huge challenge when they were asked to create a garden for the town’s Bridgend Community Centre.
Ordinarily, community gardening is right up BTCV’s street, though this project was a little different. Although the Green Gym is funded by NHS Ayrshire and Arran, the individual projects/sites and gardens do not have any funding behind them.
So we had to get creative…
The local youth group came up with designs and plans for the garden which included benches, pathways, raised beds, plastic bottle greenhouses, hedging, sensory areas and a vegetable growing area.
Sounds great, right?
How could we turn bare scraped earth into a fantastic community garden for all to enjoy, when we have no money for materials or plants?
The Green Gym-ers rose to the challenge in spectacular style using the Green mottos of reduce, re-use, recycle.
Luckily, there was an abandoned building site very close to the community centre’s garden. The site was previously the dyeworks in the town and was quite a large brick factory. This was demolished a few years prior to the Green Gym starting in Kilbirnie, and due to the recession the housing company which own the site were unable to clear the rubble and begin their build. So we seized the opportunity and found as much material as we could for our garden.
This included hardcore aggregate to put down as bottoming for the path, kerb stones as path edging and several hundred old bricks, as the material for the path itself.
The front flower bed in the garden was designed as a sensory garden, for this we edged the bed with rocks and stones found around the site, and filled the middle with topsoil and compost left over from various other BTCV jobs.
Two raised beds were built as part of the vegetable garden. One raised beds is made from railway sleepers which were found under some thick and spiky bramble bushes in the disused building site, the other is made from stone and was assembled as a drystone wall raised bed!
We added 3 further raised beds, constructed from old lorry tyres, which were located through the Freecycle website.Plants to fill these beds were donated by individuals who use the community centre frequently, and we now have a good crop of strawberries, various herbs, leeks, purple kale, cabbage and sprouts.
With the help of the youth group Sowing Seeds of Inspiration Locally (or SSOIL for short) we harvested willow from a plantation near Glasgow (for free), and replanted and wove it in the garden to create a willow screen. The group have also been helping over a number of weeks to construct a plastic bottle greenhouse which will be put up in the garden.
Several of the plants for the sensory garden were donated by people passing by the garden, we collected a lot through Freecycle, and we also added a few of our own that we had growing in our greenhouses at Auchincruive, and some leftovers from the Ayr Flower Show.
Another local volunteer group have constructed benches for us and they are to be added to the garden soon.
The most recent, and exciting addition to the garden have been some old relics from the town. No, not volunteers, but an old mile post and an old drinking fountain. These have added a bit of local history and interest to the garden, as both items were being stored away in a cupboard in the town hall and hadn’t been seen for years.
The community garden continues apace, and we hope to update you with more photos in the very near future!