Community garden looks for seed money

Grow Kids was launched last April under the Peebles Community Action Network (CAN).

It takes the form of a weekly family volunteering session, where the focus is on showing families how to grow their own vegetables in the community garden, and also how to do it themselves at home.

Each family get given seeds and seedlings that they can plant themselves and harvest later in the year.

Organiser Amy Alcorn said: “We have a Facebook group where we encourage participants to share recipes when they have used the harvest, as well as photos of their own plants and their raised beds and so on from their gardens.”

The project’s weekly activities are planting seeds, transplanting seedlings, watering, weeding, harvesting, digging and mulching.

The activities are for both parents and children, so they are working together. It’s a great way of spending quality time with your child, as well as taking the skills home to their own garden.

Amy added: “The sessions are so popular that we have a waiting list and could run more than double the sessions.

“We want the Lottery funding to provide more sessions, and to add a Cook Kids element where we run weekly sessions showing parents and children how to use the fruit and vegetables to cook together in the kitchen.”

The demand is already there, she said: “We have trialled these session in Peebles and they were very successful and popular.

“We would also use the funding to employ more people to keep the garden in a state to have more children using it, as well as staff to run the sessions.”

Amy has put the project forward to receive funds from the Lottery, and her project has made it to the shortlist for funding.

Five projects are on the shortlist,three of which will receive £50,000.

Amy needs people in Peebles and the wider Borders to vote for her project to make it into the last three and secure that funding.

To find out more about the project, and cast a vote for Grow Kids to receive the £50,000 in lottery funding, people can online and visit www.thepeoplesprojects.org.uk/projects/view/grow-kids.