Plantaura

114 baby strawberry plants potted up at grow club tonight from one bed and still more to do! If anyone wants to buy more for their garden we will be selling them 3 for £1 again once they’ve rooted a bit. We also have sage and rosemary plants for sale £1 each and a selection of seeds 50p a pack, if you want any pop down and see us (will be putting seeds on here shortly to show what we’ve got available). All proceeds go back into running the allotment ❤️🌸🌺

Todays wild plant club was all about apples….unfortunately it didn’t go to plan and we ended up with zero juice from all the apples we had harvested! However will try again next week and we did have a tasty apple crumble and custard to compensate ❤️ Did you know that there are over 7,500 varieties of apples worldwide and they contain 25% air which is why they float. The energy from 50 leaves is needed to make one apple per tree too! Apple trees can live for around 100 years and their wood is great for smoking meats and cheese and also to make utensils such as spoons and bowls. And always remember, an apple a day keeps the doctor away ❤️ Thanks also to Graham from the Bodgers too for bringing us some paint for the sheds and it was lovely to meet Mel from MIND who is hoping to introduce some new people to the allotment also ❤️

Tonight was a special one as we had a lovely lady Laura from the BBC come to film us for a little video that will be shown at the Make a difference awards in September. We made a delicious tomato sauce using our homegrown veggies herbs and of course lashings of tomatoes from the polytunnel and served it with pasta and cheese for our communal meal. We also ate slices of fried chicken of the woods mushroom that Rachel had foraged and brought for us to share…so tasty! The heavy downpour of rain earlier had made the moss on the paths super east to scrape so we managed to get most of it off the paths finally too so all round another productive evening full of friendship, food and fun ❤️

Today we have being building our staging, we have also installed a special water absorbant matting which should give our plants just the right amount of water, well we got one side finished. Hopefully tomorrow we can finish the other side.

I came across this beautiful field full of purple tansy aka lacy phacelium near Epworth yesterday and had to go and investigate as I had never seen it before. There were farmers fields full of it and it was striking against the current parched yellow landscape. Apparently it’s grown as a green manure to be dug back into the soil to enrich it and is in the top 20 world plants that are beneficial to pollinators so we will definitely be growing some asap at the allotment ❤️

Wild Plant Club this week was all about Fennel, we made it into a yougart dip, added it to cream cheese and added it to our lovely salad dressing as well a its culinary uses it has also been used as a home remeady for colic and trapped wind, one our our group often chews the seeds as a natural remedy for indigestion too.
We also experimented with making fennel, blackberry and onion inks to make lovely bookmarks, thank you to Julie who donated the string too that we used on the book marks x

Amazing news ….. Plantaura and Denaby Wellbean Social Garden - Community Allotment has been awarded a whopping £20,000 National Lottery Community Fund Grant to pay for the projects that we are hosting on there, materials, improvements and other nature workshops. We are absolutely over the moon! This means that we can provide more community workshops and we can connect more people with nature, foraging and growing their own wholesome chemical free food ❤️ We are so grateful and happy ❤️

It was such a pleasure to do the wedding flowers and bouquets for our beautiful friend Estelle and attend her wedding yesterday ❤️ She wanted eco and natural flowers so they were all foraged or grown by us along with our other lovely friend Rose who gave us some beautiful blooms from her own garden. It was a real challenge to keep things growing and find nice flowers in these drought conditions but we are so pleased that we managed to pull it off and she was very happy ❤️

Another productive grow your own club……we unwrapped our grow snails and got 5 new blackcurrant plants, 9 rosemary and 9 sage! A method we will definitely be doing again ❤️ we watered everything, spread more bark chippings around the polytunnel, potted on some lettuce, dill and purple sprouting broccoli seedlings and picked some delicious produce ❤️

Wild plant club was all about hazlenuts this week. We talked about the spring catkins being edible and used to make a delicious nutty tasting flour, the many uses of its wood and the fact that it’s been found in Neolithic diets from over 10,000 years ago. We managed to find a few before the squirrels had got to them and turned them into a nutty sugar sprinkle to top our batter fried plums and pears and custard. Yum. We also decorated pebbles which Baz took to hide around Edlington pit top ❤️