Fishing for the Moon Garden Update

 There's always a lot of excitement around a new community garden being created, it's obviously important to check up on the progress being made a year later. Despite the summer drought, this garden in Swindon Road, officially called Fishing for the Moon Garden has matured really well. If you look back at posts, you can see the start of the garden in April 2021 and the official opening in June 2021. Since then, we have returned regularly to weed between the plants and paving slabs. We don't use any weedkiller on the garden, so we need to remove weeds from between the slabs quite regularly.

This week Jane Milner-Barry and I went along to the garden to cut the dead heads off lavender and Stachys and attempt to take the matted seeds from the Stipa tenuissima, but the ground was still so dry that we had to prune them with secateurs, otherwise the plants were uprooted. I've taken some before and after photos.

As you can see, the borders had turned into a sort of overgrown wasteland

On the shady side, there's lots of mint and Phlox planted, in the photo above, Jane is dead heading them both

And above, Jane has moved further up the right-hand side of the garden, dead heading as she goes

Lots of debris from the dead heading

and above, there were quite a lot of snails behind the Stachys which were as rapidy as snails can move, finding a new home

And a couple of photos when we've swept up the debris

A couple who walked past while we were working said when they go into town, they often come and sit in the garden on their way back up the hill and love it. It's always good to get comments like that. If you go and look at the garden, you can see that there's still more to do there, we will be back. If you would like to join a group working on the garden, please email: comms@southswindon-pc.gov.uk