Welcoming 2013.

Greetings 2013. It's always a good feeling celebrating the achievements of a another year. We've accomplished alot in 2012 and the growth and progress continues right through to 2013. This winter we were amazed to how much interested individuals braved the cold and wet weather to come and visit us. We are anticipating a busy 2013 season. We will be delivering more workshops and events and carrying out more off site work. We plan to set up a few publicly run community gardens and assist community members set up veg gardens, and composting systems in their own homes. It's going to be an exciting season.

Lining the trench with
dead leaves.

One of the first activities we did this year was to build new paths running through the site. We used reclaimed wood for the borders, dead leaves and newspapers for the lining, and wood chip as a filling. We hope that these new paths will provide a better flow of traffic through the site and open up spaces for new grow beds. Pathways are very important on site such as ours. We adopt the Permaculture principle of integration and diversity. Sometimes it is not always clear what's a growing bed and what's not. So with the implementation of well defined paths we hope to elimination to problem of people trodding on the grow spaces.

I have also been working on updating the design drawing for the site. The weather has been less than accommodating as of late and we have been almost completely confined to the indoors. It has been snowing for two days straight and the site have been under a cover of over 4 inches of snow. Not much we can do in the garden during this time. I have taken this opportunity to produce a detailed scaled drawing of the entire site which can be presented to anyone wishing to view the overall design of the site and do not have the opportunity of visiting. We have also been working out ways in which we could increase the educational aspect of the site. Sign posts and  interactive info points are two of the possible addition we will be making to the site.

Snow covered polytunnel

Despite the snow many of our young plants have been enjoying the protection provided by the polytunnel. We have already started collecting plants from the herb spiral. All the herbs we have gathered so far were propagated by us from cuttings or salvaged from garden centre bins. So far we have rosemary, sage, thyme, marjoram, oregano, lemon balm, mint, calendula, and sweet violet. It's all very exciting. Earlier on we filled in all the gaps in the walls of the spiral and placed some cuttings of water cress in the small pond at the bottom which has taken well and has already started to slowly spread.

Some of the herbs inside the
polytunnel

I am very hopefully about this year. We have alot on the agenda however we need your help. We hope we will be able to encourage individuals to commit and help us develop the project and inspire our community to take responsibility for their own lives. If you're interested and have some free time on your hands check out our website www.mayproject.org then come visit us at the site.