sbcan youth fund stories: cheviot youth

We absolutley LOVE what Cheviot Youth have been up to in their garden. It is looking amazing and everyone has worked so hard. Read on to find out a bit more about their garden project.

Here at Cheviot Youth we used the money from SBCAN to dig out our old garden and plant a new, biodiverse garden, as well as build insect homes, and do litter picking over the summer. We didn’t have any gardening equipment, and our old garden was very overgrown, so we needed to buy everything from tools like spades, rakes, and trowels, to reusable garden sacks in order to remove the waste without negatively impacting the environment by adding a bunch plastic waste sacks to the landfill. The young people who participated in our summer holiday program worked very hard to help pull out all of the weeds, old plants and overgrowth from what was an existing garden from years past.

Our garden is potted in a bunch of old tyres, which allowed us to repurpose something that would have otherwise possibly be in a landfill, as well as an old bathtub, and wooden planter boxes. This is alongside the side of our building and has a cement path going down the middle. While there are a couple of small trees and bushes along the path, if we hadn’t replanted the garden the space would have not been green space where a variety of plants could flourish, provide habitat for insects of all varieties, and have a positive impact on an otherwise not green space. We also worked together with our local garden centre, Mayfeild Garden Centre, in order to make sure we used the right soil, we planted the right plants for the area with regard to sunlight and water, etc. and which food plants would produce during this time of year. We did order a couple of things off of amazon, just because they didn’t have them at the garden centre, but otherwise we tried to buy everything from the equipment, to the plants at the Mayfeild Garden Centre in order to keep our project local, and also reduce our carbon footprint.

We planted flowers, strawberries, peppers, blueberries, rhubarb, raspberries, an entire herb garden with multiple varieties of sage, rosemary, basil, oregano, and many others. We ordered kits in order to make bug hotels. We would have liked to build them ourselves with existing rubbish or materials that could be repurposed, but we didn’t know how and were a on tight timeline for providing this. We hope in the future to learn more about this and do that next time. However, with the kits the young people were able to construct the bug hotels themselves, as well as decorate them. These added to the biodiversity of our garden by providing safe shelter for insects.

Our project took place over the course of 2 days during the summer. The first day was tearing out the old garden, it was hard work and the young people did such a great job on digging out the old overgrown beds, removing the old soil, which had no nutrients left, and they got really invested in saving snails and slugs and any other insects we found. The second day was the planting of our new garden, the young people did an amazing job with this, and were truly excited to make something so beautiful, something that could provide food, and a lovely place for insects to live. On both days we also went litter picking around the area of our club. The young people always enjoy this outing, thanks to SBCAN we were able to buy more litter picking wands. We only had 2 that young people had to share, but now we have 6 and the young people are really happy about it. The young people realise that having rubbish everywhere is not good for the environment, and they are more than happy to take ownership of that and clean up their community. Unfortunately we weren’t able to eat food from our garden on our climate action days, but we did provide the young people with a healthy lunch each day which was provided by the funding from SBCAN. We also allowed the young people to help prepare and cook the food. They chopped cucumbers, lettuce, tomato, peppers, and mushrooms. We discussed the nutrients we get from healthy foods, why we choose to eat them, and the benefit of growing your own food. This ranges from reducing the carbon emissions of transporting food globally, to the oxygen the plants give back to the planet, as well as biodiversity growing a garden enhances.

The young people truly enjoyed all of these activities, and we enjoyed delivering them.