What amazing news today! Planning permission for a change of use of the site designated for the project’s community garden has been granted.
The suspense was so great that several of PLANT members even went to watch the proceedings of the Planning Committee, alongside Peter Duncan, Fife Allotments Officer, who has been instrumental in helping us get the project off the ground. Our very own PLANT photographer, Dave, perfectly captured the joy and relief on everybody’s faces at this historical moment.
It’s been a very long five months since we heard about getting our CCF award in January (even longer since the idea of the community garden came to us). We can’t wait to get to work!
So what’s next? We have already set up this online space to keep everybody informed and involved – please have a look around and let us know if there is anything we should add. Our community growing co-ordinators, Andrew and Theresa Widd will come on board before the month is out. We have started planning for the community garden set up and the first steps in ground preparation are imminent. We hope we can start some of our gardening workshops soon too.
Would you lik
e to find out more about the project or get involved? Come to the first official public meeting and a site visit with us and the Fife Council Allotments Officer, Peter Duncan. It will take place on Friday 24th of July, 7pm at the Scout Hall on Elizabeth Street, Tayport. Download flier here.
We are very keen to get as many Tayport residents involved as possible so please spread the word!
If you can’t make it we would still like to hear from you – email us. At this stage we are particularly interested in hearing from community groups wanting to take up raised garden beds in the community garden. We would also like to hear from anyone interested in growing more at home.
Sign up to the PLANT mailing list so that you do not miss out on updates and planned events – it also gives you a chance to tell us what parts of the project you may be interested in.
Before we sign off – we would like to share some words from PLANT Committee Chair, Mark O’Reilly, in response to the news. They capture our mood perfectly:
I like most aspects of gardening, but there’s something especially magical about growing things from seed. You start with a grain, which could be tiny or microscopic and then you put it in the soil, where it looks as if it’s going to get completely lost. You water it from time to time and you think about it a lot. After a while you start looking for it in the garden, but it isn’t there, and you start wondering whether you only imagined planting it, or whether it just got stifled by all the huge objects and other life-forms in the soil around it. Then one morning when you look there’s something green pushing through the soil. Is it a weed, or has somebody smashed a wine bottle in your garden? Neither – it’s your seed! Or rather, it was your seed, but now it’s a whole new life-form, pulsating with the energy to grow and flourish. You know it’s there because you put it there and coaxed it out of the ground. You know it has the potential to grow and repay the gift of life with abundant new life that will nourish whoever eats it produce.
I hope I speak for other members of PLANT as well as myself when I say that’s pretty much how I feel at this stage in the development of the community garden. It’s finally poked its young green head above the soil with the Planning Committee’s decision yesterday, and that’s a testimony to the huge amounts of hard work that many members of Plant have put into preparing the ground and sowing the seed, as well as to the vision and generosity of the Climate Challenge Fund and the guidance and determination of Fife Council. Now it’s our job to nurture this seedling garden and ensure that it goes on to yield to its maximum capacity, which, in spite of its small extent, is enormous: to yield edible produce, fresh, tasty and local, to yield education, health from eating and health from growing, and to yield carbon reduction and community building.
