Funded by Ashden and Camden Think & Do, Croydon Community Energy were able to distribute £100 to seven community groups across the borough for their community gardens. You can read about the results below!
Thank you for this micro grant, which provided an impetus for us to get the word out in our local area about our newly established community garden. As outlined in our application, we purchased and planted a small crab apple tree (malus ‘Evereste’), seed envelopes, and seeds to share with the local community (seeds included sage, thyme, oregano, nasturtiums, and a variety of sunflowers; the latter re-distributed into ‘mix’ envelopes). In addition, we purchased a small selection of summer bulbs. We had a table up on our gardening day on Sunday 19th April, and a more widely advertised drop in event on Saturday 25th April. For this, we distributed over 250 flyers to local homes, and posted a sign on the South Croydon Community Association notice board.
At our stand in the garden, we included a printed map of the space, and invited people to share their ideas for developing the garden. We also had a QR code that linked to a form where people shared ideas later and / or registered their interest in receiving future updates and/or volunteering. We also had cakes! People were pleased to be able to take seeds away to grow at home, and many said they would be keen to share some of the plants grown with the garden. We had people of all ages stop by, expressing appreciation for the project and interest in contributing. We are now quite a big group and look forward to putting together a plan for our next steps. The remaining seeds from the event have been donated to two local schools- St Peters, and Harris Primary Academy Haling Park.
The year so far for CCA Green Streets has focused on:
There are Green Streets popping up over Croydon including micro Green Streets (individual borders or tree pits). Croydon Climate Action members are directly involved in a number of these:
There are other Green Streets around Croydon, we can’t take responsibility for all of them but we hope that our positive message has inspired them:
So far we have spent £77 of the micro grant on Green Streets flyers to support our publicity and communication. We have used/using these at a:
We will have flyers remaining which we can continue to use to promote Green Streets at other events this year.
For the small remaining balance of the £100 we will either use it for seeds or for signage to help prevent spraying.
Communication with the council remains an ongoing issue. Charlie Baker was inconsistent and slow in responding, he’s now moved on. We now have Xabier as a contact which we hope will work better. Our main issue is confirming that streets have been taken off the spray list and being confident that they have been. We hope to meet with him in July and hope to confirm the process better.
We hope that the council will provide signage or funding for signage and confirm what is acceptable.
