Tag Archives: Chris Blythe
Grow Ladywood, grow!
Green-fingered people in the Ladywood area of Birmingham are being urged to make sure a new community project at their local fire station grows from strength to strength. (Photo reproduced here with kind permission of the West Midlands Fire Service, @WestMidsFire.)
The front of the station on Icknield Port Road now boasts three raised growing beds, built in less than two weeks by unemployed young people on The Prince’s Trust Team programme and planted with herbs, edible flowers, fruit and veg.
Big Dig Brum has begun!
Fifty or sixty people were expected. My guess is well over 150 turned up.
Big Dig Brum began at Birmingham Botanical Gardens on Wednesday evening. Enthusiastic, lively, interesting people, a heart-warmingly friendly bunch who gave of their all in the break-out session. Thank you everyone.
Special thanks to organisers/speakers: writer and horticulturalist Alys Fowler, Mike Hardman from BCU, Lee Hale and Clare Savage from Winterbourne’s Urban Veg, Vic Acland (Chair of the Board of Trustees at the Botanical Gardens) and last but by no means least, the instigator of the whole shebang and MC on the night, Chris Blythe.
A Big Dig in the Growing Gap
Every grass roots movement finds itself pulled in two directions: mucking in vs. wider coordination; hands on vs. strategy. Birmingham’s many community growing projects find themselves getting on with the former, and not so much of the latter.
An emphasis on one direction over the other leaves us with gaps: gaps in communication, gaps in in getting things done, gaps in sustaining a project. For example, at this point, the communication gap means that we don’t even know how many Birmingham groups there are!