Micro-garden regular meet up 13/10/21 & 28/10/21

On Wednesday,  13^th October two members of the micro-garden met with a member of Lancaster University’s Growing Together Team on site to discuss how to proceed with regard to ideas for the wellbeing barometer. The Growing Together Team had been busy designing innovative icons based around the thriving/ struggling concept that we’ve developed for the garden. After some discussion we felt that the best way forward was to continue developing the overall concept for the barometer with the community gardeners and then hand our concept over to a professional artist/ designer to create the finished work.  As the evening quickly turned to darkness we kept our meeting short with a general litter pick and the installation of a new community compost bin on site. We discussed changing the timing of the evening meet ups to something more practical such as a weekend afternoon due to the longer nights.

Our second October meeting was organised for Thursday 28^th October so that we could make use of the main room at Stanley’s Community Centre in the West End. We had 3 micro-garden members, 1 family member and 5 young people attend and we focussed upon creating decorations for our upcoming Halloween event. During our extended 3 hour session we enabled the young people to design pumpkin faces, which the adult team members then carved out and we created a life-size Victorian lady ‘ghost’ from chicken wire that was affectionately nick-named ‘Lady Cavendish’ after our Cavendish Road garden site. Lady Cavendish was adorned with silver tinsel for hair and a number of colourful EL wire lights were woven through her to give a spooky light effect.

On 31^st October from 6-8pm we held a fun Halloween social event for the community garden members. Unfortunately the weather was very much against us so we had very few ‘trick or treaters’ visit us, but we enjoyed socialising with our friends and neighbours and relaxing after a busy Growing Together workshop.  We particularly enjoyed some amazing cakes that one of our members had baked, we did some face painting, we had fun decorating the large gazebo with spooky lights and of course we had the spooky presence of Lady Cavendish!