Charles Street wildbed update

Two weeks on from the unfortunate Charles St wild bed clearance..you'll be pleased to know that the situation has been resolved with the local authorities.We received an apology for the over enthusiastic

management of the bed and it's been agreed that we can continue to host a wild bed along the fence line. 

I've made a sign today at Louth Men's Shed (more of that excellent concept in later posts :)) which hopefully will get the message across for the purpose of the "messy" bed and avoid a similar incident in the future.

I'm really pleased that we're able to keep this bed going for all those residents who've stopped to look and expressed their appreciation for the wide variety of uncommon wild plants on display... it would be great if small beds like this helped make the uncommon, common, don't you think? 

Thanks for all the messages of support

Cheers

James 

The ups and downs of community gardening

Ok I'm sat down enjoying a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit desperately trying to think of the words to describe my feelings about the events of the morning.
First off we had a meeting at the Gatherums tiding up the beds and planting out some seedlings and enjoyed the splash of colour at the herb garden created by the early sowing of the Grow Wild seed kit
that we got from the RHS.

The pollinators were loving the variety of flowers that had appeared in the last two weeks and we were rightly proud of our efforts to help improve bio-diversity in our town.




Ok all well and good and spirits were high until we reached the Charles St garden and discovered to our horror that the contractor
had been instructed to obliterate the wild flower bed that we had sown and planted in December 2012. Sadly we weren't there in time to try and help save some of the wide variety of pollinator friendly plants that were in there.

They left behind the cans & bottles for the volunteers to collect

Bizarrely the only plant they left is a cultivated shrub which I doubt is much use to the pollinators, but on the plus side it looks nice and isn't prickly

A species under threat gets evicted..because things must be tidied up 

From what I can gather from a brief conversation with Cllr Sarah Dodds, ELDC had a walk round and decided to weed the area because of complaints from residents.

We didn't have any sign up to suggest this was being left wild for environmental reasons so no-one thought to ask before clearing it up,

I'm going to put a sign up now to explain what has happened, to all the passers by that I know have enjoyed the bed over the last couple of years.

Apparently ELDC are going to turf it over.