Maryon Park Community Garden

Report for Friends of Maryon Parks: February 2025

Gardening and Growing
After the Christmas and New Year break volunteers have been planting bulbs and plot-holders sowing seeds. Kalvis, the Community Garden gardener, has started to introduce more colour and flowers in the Community Garden.

Plot-holders
Catherine and Ruth Tongue have joined the Community Garden as plot-holders.

Forest School
Congratulations to Anthony Rennie, one of the Windrush School teachers who takes sessions in our Forest School space on gaining his ‘Forest School Leader’ qualifications. Anthony with his Windrush Primary School class have discovered stag beetle larvae, a protected species, in the Forest School space.

Volunteers
The Wednesday volunteer group has been cleaning the stone walls and improving the far end of the Community Garden finding and removing glass left from the old council greenhouse. The Good Gym volunteers worked in the Community Garden in January repairing wind damage and clearing leaves.

Visitors
Dominic Price and Holly Stanworth from the ‘Species Recovery Trust’ called into the Community Garden on a field trip to Charlton’s parks and woodlands. The Salisbury based ‘Species Recovery Trust’ is interested in re-establishing the vary rare ‘Starved Wood-sedge’ in Charlton as the plant had been recorded in Charlton Park in the 1800s. The Community Garden might host this historic plant.

Gardening Therapy
New plot-holder, Candy Zhang, is to set up a ‘Gardening Therapy’ project to be based in the Community Garden during the spring.

Fundraising
Capital Growth who promotes Community Gardens and urban growing have announced that they will not be running their ‘Good to Grow’ week this year due to lack of funding. We have run a ‘Good to Grow’ open day for the last 10 years but will be looking to find other ways for fundraising in the future.

Digital Life
The Community Garden has a website and Facebook page. The Facebook page has weekly updates:
https://maryonparkcommunit.wixsite.com/website
https://www.facebook.com/MaryonParkFoodGrowingProject/

Maintenance
The Community Garden main entrance has a pedestrian gate and a double-door vehicle gate.
The pedestrian gate needed attention from Neil a local steel worker from ‘Red Cube Metalworks’ based in Lansdowne Mews, Charlton.

The Green Room
There are vacancies for the use of the Community Garden indoor space, the Green Room, that overlooks the park.

MPCG Tim (Chair) and Edna (Secretary)