An Update on the Swindon Road Garden

In January this year, I published a post telling people that we were hoping to have a new community garden in Swindon Road, where there's a gap between houses. Working in conjunction with South Swindon Parish Council we were hoping to create a green oasis as part of our South Swindon Blooming pledge to keep planting throughout the parish. This year things didn't go to plan as you know, there were problems using the Beehive as a place where we could encourage community gardeners to meet, but the plans are still there to improve the area, but not with the community involved until it's safe to do so.

In the meantime, the parish ground workers have been given the task of clearing the beds of bindweed, and digging out the shrubs and bushes, leaving just the tree near the pavement. The benches have been removed and had new hardwood timber fitted to them. I went to have look at the garden, and discuss the next steps, should we try and keep digging out the bindweed now we don't use glyphosate anymore, or should we cover with membrane? I wasn't keen on the latter, I'd rather keep digging out the bindweed, hoping we will be able to get some volunteers to help.

I took these photos last week, you can see it's looking almost ready for planting:

As you look at the garden, the wall on the right hand side was falling into the garden, so has been buttressed creating rather nice small beds as you can see above.