‘When I grow a leek, it’s worth so much more than one from the supermarket’

George places the point of his chisel into the pencil-marked surface of a big piece of hemlock, and with two sharp taps the wood curls away like butter. Hunched in a big green overcoat, he is finishing off lettering that spells ‘Golden Hill Community Garden’, while fellow volunteer Maria carves out a sprig of leaves. It’s a new sign for the entrance to the garden, and will hang above the gates at the Spring Fair on May 11. The afternoon of music, merriment and plant sales raises vital funds for the garden, and it’s coming around quickly.

“So we’re up against it!” George jests. A carpenter by trade since he left school at 15, George was a joiner for his working life before retiring. Both he and Maria have been helping in the garden for a couple of years. “It’s enjoyable, init,” George says between rhythmic tap-taps of their wooden mallets. “It makes me still feel useful. Once you retire you think, ‘oh god, what am I going to do?’. And you get tea and biscuits! What more do you want?”

Carpenter George works on the sign that will hang above the gate at the Spring Fair

On cue it hits 11am and we down tools in the little straw bale house, built by volunteers in 2014, to find a cuppa. Everyone comes in from where they have been working around the site: planting up seed trays; weeding the polytunnels; harvesting the first crops in the raised beds; clearing the ground behind the compost bins.

Community project worker Lucy Mitchell, who spends every Wednesday here supporting the volunteers – and up to 40 come each week – has produced a battered biscuit tin and put some water on to boil. Under the gazebo everyone pulls up a plastic lawn chair. A line of muddy gloves dances, blown by a stiff spring breeze, and the birds tweet fit to burst.

Time for a tea-break in the pagoda

“It’s been my job to make sure that the garden has the community’s involvement,” Lucy says as mugs of tea are passed around. She previously volunteered at Easton Community Garden, and enjoyed the experience of befriending people from outside her social circle as well as developing gardening skills.

“I really, really loved it,” Lucy says. “It was just such an amazing way to learn how to garden – sharing all the triumphs. I popped along one week and it was amazing and I wanted to make it my life.”

She has deliberately instilled a similar ethos here, encouraging volunteers to focus on each other as well as their gardening work: “The principle the garden was set up with was accessibility, and for me that means being a place where anyone can come and feel welcomed. If you’re feeling really fragile, a passing comment can be crushing, especially if you’re doing something new.”

Lucy shows a Wednesday volunteer what needs doing in one of the raised beds

This sense of accessibility has evolved over the eight years the garden has been established. Initially, it was conceived by the Horfield & District Allotments Association as a space for gardeners with mobility issues, after committee chair Neil Pirie and vice chair Pete Clee saw raised beds built at Thingwall Park Allotments in Fishponds in 2006.

“We’d been thinking for five or six years about what to do with this desperate piece of land,” Pete says, sitting down on a bench where Richard Page and Saskia Gildawie, assisted by her daughter, are planting peas. The six plots within Golden Hill Allotments, tucked away off Gloucester Road behind the blank brick walls of HMP Bristol, had been abandoned after becoming waterlogged.

Volunteer Richard plants seeds in front of the sump pump that saved this waterlogged piece of land

Lacking the funds to improve it themselves, and spurred on by plotholder Clare Hanson-Khan, who was suffering from mobility problems, they successfully bid for money from The Big Lottery’s Local Food Fund to transform the site into a wheelchair-friendly garden.

Work began in 2011, through a winter where it rained incessantly. Lucy took up her post and already keen volunteers were turning up every Wednesday. The raised beds solved the issue of the sodden ground as well as being physically accessible, and a solar sump pump was moving water back up to the top of the allotments, where it serviced the taps and troughs for all the plotholders. Nine beds were offered to local groups, including mental health charity Second Step, and the ground began to regain its productivity.

Just a few months after opening, with the mud drying and the hawthorn in bloom, Pete and Lucy staged a Spring Fair to let the community know the garden was there. “Mostly it was by word of mouth that people were coming to volunteer,” Pete says. “So we decided to open the gardens for a fair. We knew a few people would come, but in the end we got 600 through the gate. It all kicked off from there because that interest was generated.”

Pete Clee and Lucy Mitchell will don their crowns again for the Spring Fair

This year’s fair, on May 11, will be their eighth. Kids will run through the sensory trail that smells like mint while bands play live music, and soil-scattered benches will be swept for flower crown workshops. Thousands of plants that the volunteers have grown from seed – dill, sweet basil, wild rocket, yellow podded mangetout – will go to new homes. Faces will be painted, the pond will be dipped, and the frog-shaped pizza oven will croak into life. Everything is offered by donation, with money raised ploughed back into the garden.

“The first Spring Fair was terrifying because I’d never run an event before. I think I had stayed awake for about three months beforehand, panicking about doing a big party that no one was going to come to,” Lucy laughs. “By now we’ve got quite a bit of momentum. We know that whatever the weather, as long as we put the bunting up and promise them cake, the people of Bishopston will come to our fairs.”

Even the youngest users of the garden have been getting involved in readying it for the Spring Fair: the Golden Buds toddler groups who come to the garden every week; families of children with special educational needs who visit on special adventure days; a local Beavers group who look after a raised bed.

Lunch for the Wednesday volunteers is produce from the garden: soup in winter, salad in summer

Lunchtime is fast approaching, and Lucy unwraps loaves of bread and finds a jar of sweet homemade green tomato chutney. In winter there’s soup, using produce from the garden; come spring it’s salad. Lindsey Dando comes out of the polytunnel with a big bowl of fresh leaves picked straight off the plants, a streak of soil in her hair. On the steps to the bale house today’s harvest is piling up: leeks as thick as a child’s arm; a pale squash; a basket of cabbage leaves.

“When I bring home a leek or something from the garden, to me it’s worth so much more than one from the supermarket,” says George Budden – George the Younger, the volunteers joke, as carpentry-whizz George takes a seat. “It almost has an emotional meaning to it, in that I know we’ve all grown it. I always make sure to use as much of it as I can because it’s not just any old leek – it’s our leek.”

George started coming to the garden a year ago for his mental health: “It’s changed my life, in terms of getting out and about. It’s a really important part of my week now. It’s such a great way to de-stress and do something physical and see change happen in front of you – and I think that’s so rewarding and so good for your wellbeing. You feel productive and useful.”

The allotments are open to anyone who wants to volunteer on a Wednesday

Adults with learning disabilities are also encouraged to come to the Wednesday sessions, getting a meaningful job from Lucy and joining everyone for a sociable lunch. Neil and Vanessa have both come with their carers and are stopping for a sandwich after a morning of digging, sawing and watering. Neil lives in nearby supported living accommodation and has been visiting the garden for several years.

“It gets me out of the house and I do a lot of things,” he says, before turning to enthusiastically greet some volunteers who have just arrived.

“We’ve been incredibly lucky with the people that turn up and keep on coming,” Pete says. “We’ve got volunteers who started before this was even remotely like a garden, and have come pretty much every week since. And the beauty is that we keep getting new volunteers, and once they come they seem to stick.

“When we started we had no real idea what the implications would be for having a community garden. I always make a point of not asking people why they come and volunteer: I wait until they tell me, and It’s amazing the reasons people have and the benefits that they gain. It’s terrific to see the change in people. Just to see them develop is the most satisfying thing.”

The Golden Hill Community Garden Spring Fair takes place on Saturday, May 11 from 1-4pm. Find out more about the event and becoming a Wednesday volunteer by visiting www.thegoldenhillcommunitygarden.com

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