A Peabody gardens trip

I organised a visit to Peabody gardens for residents. Peabody care a lot about their open spaces and as part of their sustainability initiatives want to encourage residents to grow their own vegetables. I don’t know anything about growing vegetables, but said yes when I was asked to lead on resident-led gardening. It was not my first choice for thematic lead, but I am in my first year with Peabody and it’s not a savvy thing to be awkward and besides, I do have a garden I love.

So, first of all I have to do a bit of research about where we do have raised beds, allotments, set aside spaces, then ring, email or write to all my contacts to ask if they would be interested in showing residents their gardening space and to visit other people’s.

In the end we had enough interest to fill a 16 seater mini-bus. It was a school day, but everyone was over 40, apart from a student on work experience. Two quotes stand out from the day:

“ I didn’t have any friends until I joined the gardening group”, and “How do you keep your cabbage leaves so clean?”, only because not being a devotee, it made me smile.

These trips take some co-ordination and military sticking to time because a lot of colleagues need to be involved

• The guy who drives the bus who knows exactly where he doesn’t want to be at certain times because of traffic jams and has to be somewhere else at 4pm
• The lady who provides the food which was all a bit chaotic because the table was not set when we arrived, they did not have some of the food choices on the menu sent out, 2 people had not sent back their orders, they had run out of cutlery …. The driver and I got to be waiters
• External food growing expert partners who had their own domestic issues on the day
• The landscape guy who was running late and because of time constraints got about 5 minutes to get his point across – if that actually.

The important thing is it happened. Those 16 people turned up. They saw some other gardens, met each other, got a bit of inspiration and had a free day out with very nice lunch.

My job is to keep that interest and co-ordinate the resources and the expertise to nourish it to new, collective heights AND to make sure that all my colleagues get something that ticks their boxes too.