Our November Update

Social Therapeutic Horticulture

All three of our Social Therapeutic Horticulture groups (Nature Nurture, Veterans Bloom and Sow and Thrive) enjoyed the dry autumnal weather earlier in the month. This month saw the end of both the current Sow and Thrive and Veterans Bloom flower farming courses. It has been lovely to see both groups in action and both courses are set to run again in spring.

The Nature Nurture group finished the change over of the tunnel from summer to winter crops and spent time helping weed some of the other beds at Tuppenny – and sowing sweet peas for selling in the shop. They finished up the month making lovely festive cards.

Veteran Blooms were busy planting tulips and anemones in the cutting garden and spent the last couple of weeks finishing off preparing for our festive wreath workshops. On the the last day of the course we visited a local flower farmer to look at their setup and the equipment needed to run a flower farming business.

In the Garden

In addition to the magic pest repellant, we’ve just bought some Enviromesh to try out. It is meant to keep even aphids such as white fly off our brassicas so we’ve just installed the first patch over the latest sprouting brocolli.

We are in the process of planning for the new seasons in 2025, with seed ordering for vegetables fruit, cut flowers and herbs.  Next year we are hoping to expand our herb and cut flower offering to the community.

The pruning has continued into late autumn, with boysenberries pruned and tied in ready for next year and the summer raspberries fed with potash and mulched (a little late). The autumn raspberries will soon be cut back to ground level. We are continuing to crop apples from the orchard.

We have had a number of school visits to the outdoor classroom this month. St Anthony’s school came with their year 5 pupils for a second visit – this is part of a series of 3 fully funded visits. The pupils were very happy to return again and fully engaged with the activities including cooking cheese and herb muffins and making clay bugs.

The Sunflowers continued to build on their visit to Pallant House Gallery with collages made of natural materials and autumn coloured paper. The results were beautiful.

The Poppy group also explored colours with natural paints. They created beautiful pictures with some surprising colours from beetroot, nasturtium leaves and flowers and berries.

Collaborations

We were fortunate to have a large party of volunteers from Hyde Housing Association last Friday. They worked to help increase the biodiversity of the pond and surrounding planting in addition to removing our invasive pond plant, namely New Zealand pygmy weed.  They also created a hibernaculum for overwintering reptiles and amphibians and managed to plant up the herb bank with new grasses and herbs, which will be used by the Education Team, Jammers in the kitchen and contribute to our seasonal bouquets.

The Goodwood Education Team paid us a visit at the beginning of the month. They have a similar role and goals as our Education Team, hosting school visits in addition to other community groups, but have the Goodwood Farm as their teaching resource, so dairy, sheep and arable as their focus. Despite Goodwood have a few thousand acres in comparison with our one hectare, we confirmed that we appear to have the same challenges and agreed to collaborate going forward.

As we look to fundraise for our next three Veterans Bloom courses, we have recently formed a collaboration with Sirius Analytics who have kindly agreed to support some of the work that we do in this arena. A couple of their staff are female veterans, so are fully aware of the need of such an important green therapy initiative. We have decided to teach horticulture skills for this client group, in addition to flower farming building on the successes of 2024.