Seeds of hope at Highbury

Preparations to open an allotment garden at Highbury are well underway, so we caught up with Suzanne Foulk from The Live Project to find out more.

There’s been a lot happening on the Come Grow With Me @ Highbury allotment garden recently, in preparation for our official opening on the 16 June at our Summer Fayre.

I have to say well done to all who have got involved including our regular volunteer Michael, of course us members from the Live Team and a number of other willing staff from the site.

We recently shifted eight tons of topsoil into the allotment area in barrow loads, to fill the nine raised beds. The raised beds were erected over a weekend by Wendy Ireland, Activity Coordinator on Cherry Ward, and her husband David in their own time. We’ve also created three additional beds using the extra soil and the bags the soil came in, planting potatoes in them.

Karen Fry - expert gardener and our sessional worker - comes in four hours a week is doing a brilliant job of painting the artwork design onto the shed from the competition held last year. This is the centrepiece as you walk in, and its bright colours have made a difference to everyone’s mood already. A patient from The Willows said to me on Tuesday, “I just want to sit in here all day, that shed cheers me up.“

Some of the team who have been working on the allotment

We’ve had lots of donations of seeds and plants, notably from Steve Cox, Healthcare Assistant from The Willows. Steve has also offered to be our chief waterer in the Live Team’s absence.

With a lot of hard work from Claire Blakey and Amy Smith - Occupational Therapists from the Live Team - we are getting really equipped with tools, shelving and plant pots ready for the start of the patient activity timetable on 6 June. Claire has worked hard on this, visiting every team to find out when they could come over and talking to inpatients and service users about what they would like to grow. Many inpatients have already been over and either got involved in the digging or planting, or sat on the benches and had a cup of tea which we bring over on a trolley.

We’ve got many different things growing in the greenhouse now, and we’ve start the planting in the wooden raised beds. Horizon Day Services, the Orion Unit and The Woodlands have their own raised beds and we will see much more activity from the 6 June when the patient timetable kicks in. It’s really exciting to think how things will look at the end of the summer.

The project is generating more and more interest, with more regular volunteers in the pipeline. We have plans for an outdoor meeting room, sensory garden and a labyrinth area for outdoor mindfulness sessions. Only last week we were able to supply the new Options Café on the Highbury site with some lettuces and we plan to do more of this in the future.

The whole project has created a real buzz on site. A patient who had been out to look at the garden said to me this week, “Growing something from a seed gives me hope that my life can change and not always be like it is right now.”