The Case for Belhaven Community Garden – 2023 Report

Contents

  1. What is the Belhaven Community Garden?
  2. Governance
  3. Events at the Garden
  4. Partnerships
  5. Community Fruit Pressing Equipment
  6. Keep Scotland Beautiful Award
  7. Community Garden Outreach Projects
  8. Case Studies
  9. Challenges we face
  10. List of Wild Flowers at the BCG

1 What is the Belhaven Community Garden?

Belhaven Community Garden (BCG) is a Sustaining Dunbar project to transform an area of land adjacent to Belhaven Hospital, Dunbar, into gardens where local residents, community groups, staff and patients can grow together. It has been running since 2012 when we first secured an agreement with NHS Lothian.

Under this agreement, Sustaining Dunbar volunteers have been working to transform the grounds of Belhaven Hospital into:

A Therapeutic Space–for peace and relaxation, for staff, patients, visitors and local people.

A Growing Space–for herbs, flowers, fruit and vegetables, for anyone who wants to come together with others in a supportive, sharing environment.

A Learning Space–for sharing practical food growing and regenerative land-care skills, for all ages and abilities.

A Biodiverse Space -for developing the range and variety of habitats so as to enhance the number and variety of species in the garden and its soil.

A Therapeutic Space

  • Hospital patients and visitors can sit in the sensory garden and walk around the orchard with family as a break from the clinical setting, often reminding them of their gardening years.
  • NHS staff regularly take breaks and have meetings in the garden.
  • Garden volunteers run social events in the garden to bring people together over good food.
  • The Green Team – In 2020, a project was initiated to bring Adults with Learning Difficulties into the garden for light gardening and other nature based activities.  This is a weekly session and has successfully engaged the adults in many gardening activities.  They are currently helping restore the boat-planter behind the hospital before the NHS 75th anniversary event in September.  This is managed by Naomi Barnes and the sessions are run by Carey Douglas and partly funded by Belhaven Brewery and other local funders.
  • Dementia Carer’s visits on an ad hoc basis.
  • Local dog walkers regularly visit the gardens for a peaceful morning, evening or daytime stroll.  This has resulted in a number of locals getting involved in the garden as volunteers and has strengthened the relationships between local residents. 

A Growing Space

  • Over 40 volunteers cultivate the communal growing areas all year round: 21 raised beds, 9 communal field plots, 1 polytunnel, 2 soft fruit patches, an orchard, the nuttery with 6 walnuts and many hazelnut trees.  We run weekly volunteer sessions on Saturdays, 2-4pm and Wednesdays sessions.  People who volunteer on Saturdays harvest together throughout the growing season and take home produce gathered each week.  
  • 18 volunteers cultivate 15 individual field plots.
  • In the orchard we are growing 143 fruiting trees, including 23 Scottish Heritage apple varieties, 6 varieties of pear, and 3 varieties of plums which are not grown or sold commercially. 
  • Surplus produce is used to supply The Community Carrot.  In 2022, we sold a total of 237kg of fruit.  In 2021, during lockdown, our total fruit sales totalled 423kg.
  • Flowers and willow are grown and sold to Pixie Rose, florist.
  • We have built 4 very large compost heaps and process our own green compost.
  • We regularly recycle seaweed from East Beach and woodchip from local tree surgeons.
  • We have set up water capture systems on the polytunnel to reduce our dependence on tap water.

A Learning Space

  • The Belhaven Buddies project brings teenagers from Dunbar Grammar school into the garden and hospital to buddy the residents of the nursing home ‘Blossom House’.  The group do a dementia awareness training course and then weekly sessions with the residents doing a range of activities, and gardening.  This is managed by Naomi Barnes and run by Carey Douglas. 
  • The Rural Skills course has been running at BCG since 2021 and this year is predominantly based at the garden.  The course is organised through The Ridge and is coordinated by East Lothian Works, who select students from across East Lothian’s secondary schools.  It is certified by the Scottish Qualifications Authority at National 4 level. Students opt in as part of their choice of college courses and they attend on Tues and Thursday afternoons 1.30-3.30pm every week during the school year.  The BCG supports this course as we can offer students a wide variety of tasks which fulfil the curriculum and we are successful in seeing some of the students go on to take up places at Oatridge College in West Lothian or local employment in the garden centre.  This course is one of the few opportunities for students in East Lothian to learn practical gardening skills in an outdoor setting where their work genuinely contributes to an active community project. 
  • Skill share sessions.  Before our Saturday volunteer sessions, we offer skill share sessions for gardeners where they can learn specific skills such as composting, sowing seeds, potting on etc. 
  • Beaver and cub gardening badges are completed each year at the garden in early autumn.
  • Adhoc workshops take place in the garden throughout the year.  For instance, we’ve covered foraging, wildflower hunts, art in the garden, yoga in the garden, apple and pear tree pruning, ink making, tincture making, etc.
  • The Bee School is getting back up and running after a short break and this year we re-housed a bee swarm in one of our free hives. The bee keeping on the field is primarily for pollination purposes and we currently have 3 bee colonies.
  • We share practical organic food growing techniques

A biodiverse space

  • One of our main aims is to recover the fertility and health of the soil on the site by growing green manures between crops, returning organic material back to the soil after we lift crops and completely avoiding use of any chemical fertilisers, pesticides or herbicides. 
  • Now the hedging is more mature and the willow, hazel and fruit trees are a good size, the most noticeable difference on the site is the explosion of small birds, which frequently attract a local sparrowhawk.  Robins, sparrows, blackbirds, thrushes, starlings, wrens are a common sight in the garden. 
  • The hazel trees have been coppiced and some poles have been used for the rebuild of the Crannog Centre at Loch Tay.  Others have been used for making hay rakes for the Merlindale Country Fair.  Hazel provides a good replacement for bamboo for growing climbing veg.  The coppiced stools grow back each year for future use.
  • We have completed a wild flower bioblitz and we note sightings of butterflies throughout the summer.  See below for the lists we’ve compiled.
  • At the top of the field, we are growing a wildflower meadow and keep honey bees.  
  • Beyond the wildflower meadow, a 4 year old woodland area is growing well, with birch, hazel, hawthorn, blackthorn, dogrose, holly, and rowan.
  • We have planted several hawthorn and blackthorn hedges to help break the wind across the field in specific areas.
  • We have gradually built up 3 ‘dead hedges’ on site to act as windbreaks for the orchard and to provide a valuable insect habitat.  These are made from any woody material that takes a long time to break down, e.g. willow trunks, or hedge clippings.
  • We have not had a sighting of a hedgehog yet, but we have plenty of evidence that there is a hedgehog on site from their scat. 

2 Governance

The garden steering group currently has 8 members and meets every month to plan the planting schemes, working parties, events and socials and resolve any issues.  We run a facebook page to make our events public:  Belhaven Community Garden and we use an online forum groupsio.com for our volunteers to discuss garden matters.  A member of the steering group attends a quarterly meeting of the NHS Greenspace Activity Group, which is convened by Ian McKenzie, the Greenspace and Health Programme Manager.  This is a group set up to deliver on the NHS’s Greenspace Strategy and share good practice.

3 Events at the garden

Seedling Swap is a spring event in the garden.  People bring surplus seedlings to swap for different varieties and we hold a plant sale at the same time.  This is an increasingly popular event where garden enthusiasts come together to find more unusual varieties of fruit, vegetables, flowers and herbaceous plants. 

Civic Week Events 2023. This year we organised a wildflower hunt to gather data about the varieties growing in our wildflower meadow and around the site.  We also ran a family fun event around the theme of hedgehogs with the Pledgehog Officer, Jen Walker.  This included children’s games and scavenger hunt, a reading corner, face painting, tours of the garden and refreshments. 

Apple Day is an annual community event in the garden to bring people together to celebrate the apple harvest in early October.  We offer tours of the garden, apple pressing, produce, cakes and refreshments and activities for children.  We display the various Scottish Heritage apple varieties grown in the orchard and people can taste them and discuss growing techniques. Groups harvest apples from the orchard on the day and use the garden apple mincer and Hydro press to make juice, which is then shared out and bottled up for taking home. 

Wassailing in the orchard has become a recently established winter tradition to gather in the orchard around a bonfire, sing wassailing songs, and bless the orchard for the following year to bring a good harvest.  First started during the pandemic in 2020 when outdoor socialising was the only way to gather, it’s become a firm favourite amongst our gardeners and locals.

4 Partnerships 

We collaborate with many local organisations on a regular basis.  Our umbrella organisation is Sustaining Dunbar and we work with the following: 

(NHS) Belhaven Hospital – Belhaven Buddies project

The Ridge – Rural Skills course; joint application pending for a community trailer

Dunbar Nursery’s Beehive Garden – our volunteers regularly put time in to care for this garden

East Lothian Council – drops off seaweed or street leaves for compost and mulch at the garden

The Community Carrot & Pixie Rose – which sell our surplus fruit and flowers/willow

Dunbar Shed –  construction of a bench & compost bays

Dunbar Grammar School – Belhaven Buddies project & Duke of Edinburgh volunteers at Saturday sessions

Treetek – a tree surgeon, who supplies us with woodchip

The Belhaven Brewery – sponsors our garden outreach projects (The Green Team, The Pledgehog Project, Belhaven Buddies and Beehive Buddies at the Primary School)

Dunbar Community Woodland – supplied us with planks and logs for benches; loans us their ‘Muck Truck’ which is large barrow with an engine to move large quantities of material, e.g. mulch. 

 

5 Community Fruit pressing equipment 

At the Belhaven Community Garden we want to support local people to make the most of their own fruit harvests by making the tools available to hire. The equipment that we hire out was purchased thanks to grants from the Scottish Government’s Community Climate Asset Fund and Scotland Loves Local.  This year we have developed our own online booking system to make it easier to access and book the equipment:  https://sustainingdunbar.org/projects/community-fruit-press/

6 Keep Scotland Beautiful Award 

The BCG has been assessed yearly since 2019 and consistently achieved an award of excellence.

7 Community Garden Outreach projects

5 Community Garden Outreach projects have been initiated since 2020, providing new opportunities for nursery children, teens, and adults with learning difficulties. 

  • The Beehive Garden at Dunbar Nursery School is being developed with direct support from volunteers at the Belhaven Community Garden.  The aim of the project is to have an area where nursery children can grow food and plants and connect with nature.  It is also a base for Dunbar Grammar students on the childcare course to come and do work experience with nursery children to have practical experience for their National Qualifications. 
  • The Green Team is based at the BCG and offers nature based activities and light gardening for adults with learning difficulties.
  • The Belhaven Buddies project is a partnership between Dunbar Grammar and the hospital to bring young people into the hospital and connect with residents of the nursing home.
  • The Pledgehog Project is a biodiversity project to raise awareness of the plight of hedgehogs in Dunbar and to help reverse the downward trend of populations by demonstrating how best to create hedgehog friendly habitat and access to gardens. 
  • Restoration of the Victorian Garden at Belhaven Brewery.  Last year, we had 4 young volunteers working alongside our horticulturalist to restore these gardens. 

As a result of our outreach projects, Sustaining Dunbar is employing 2 part time gardeners for 20 hours a week, 1 Hedgehog officer for 6 hours a week, engaging 30 teens from Dunbar Grammar (each year), enabling all 144 nursery children to access the Beehive Garden and food growing, as well as 2 adults with learning difficulties plus their team of carers in gardens, growing and nature based activities. 

These projects are funded by Belhaven Brewery, DELAP, The Robertson Trust and The Amos Trust. They are managed by Naomi Barnes. 

8 Case Studies

Dissertations – two students have completed dissertations on the garden:  Heather Cameron (Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge) ‘Social and Material World-Making in a Scottish Community Garden’ completed in 2021 and Xian Wu (MSc in Landscape and Wellbeing, University of Edinburgh) ‘The Motivations and Barriers of Community Garden Participants’ completed in 2022.  Both students conducted interviews with volunteers and visited and worked in the garden throughout the time of their research.

Designer of our flyer and posters – Ellis Paterson, a newly graduated graphic design student, worked with us on a volunteer basis in spring ‘23 to design a leaflet to promote the garden and inform visitors about our project.  This in turn helped her to complete a portfolio which led to her first job. 

Designer of our BCG logo – Barbara Rowell offered her design skills to create the BCG logo in 2020.

Duke of Edinburgh volunteers – each year we attract 3-4 DGS students who volunteer their time at the Saturday sessions to complete their Duke of Edinburgh awards.

Natalie Taylor’s Soil project ‘Terra Firma’  – this was organised through North Light Arts and involved a number of events at the garden which contributed to artist Natalie Taylor’s exhibition at the Townhouse in June 2022.  

9 Challenges we face

The biggest challenge facing the Belhaven Community Garden is the precariousness of our agreement with the NHS to use the site and the threat of development.  We currently have an agreement with the NHS Estates Department which is renewed every 2 years, which was renewed most recently in 2022.  However, the site is also designated as ‘on the disposal list’ by the NHS Estates Department.  

Furthermore, on the 2018 Local Development Plan the Belhaven Hospital Field has a designation of 40 housing units which would threaten the existence of the community project and which we would like to see reassessed.

Recently, there is a new challenge to the integrity of the site.  ELC is exploring the option of putting a cycle and footpath through the field to create a route to school for new residents of the Belhaven Way scheme on the other side of the railway which is currently being built.  A thoroughfare through the field would undermine our attempts to create a wildlife habitat, away from bright lights, fast moving transportation and noise.  It would undo the quiet and tranquillity of the site for gardeners and provide many more opportunities for casual vandalism which is already a growing issue.  A path would lead to the loss of a large section of our mature orchard or growing space on the field, further reducing our ability to function.

The next biggest challenge that we face currently in the garden is the lack of access to the hospital water supply.  This was switched off in August 2022 due to an outbreak of legionella on the hospital premises.  The remedial works have been ongoing on the site since this time but the infection control department is still undergoing testing before our water can be reconnected.  Our neighbours have been incredibly generous in helping us get through the 2023 growing season by allowing us to use their water supply. However, this creates a lot of extra work for our volunteers.

Wildflowers found at BCG June 2023                                 

Alkanet, Black Medick, Borage, Bramble, Cat’s Ear, Cleavers (sticky willie), Clover- red and white, Comfrey, Cornflower, Cow Parsley, Cranesbill, Cress- Heart-podded hoary cress, Daisy, Dandelion, Dock, Fat Hen, Forget-me-not, Fox and Cubs, Fumitory, Ground Elder, Groundsel, Hogweed- hairy and dock, Trefoil- Hop and Bird’s foot, Knapweed- common/black, Ladies Bedstraw, Lesser hop trefoil, Mares tail, Meadow buttercup, Meadow Pea, Meadow vetchlin, Mouse-ear chickweed, Mugwort, Oxeye daisy, Plantain and Ribwort Plantian, Poppies, Ragwort, Rosebay Willow herb, Shepherds purse, Sorrel- common, Stinging Nettle, Sun Spurge euphorbia, Tansy, Thistle- Field Thistle and Sow Thistle, Vetch -Hairy Tare Vetch and Tufted Vetch, Wood Sorrel, Yarrow, Yellow Rattle.

Grasses, Crested Dogtail, Crested Wheatgrass, Yorkshire Fog, False oat grass