Adventures in Community Gardening

I’ve been thinking recently about getting a horse and cart. I don’t have a car, not even a driving license. Most of the time I’m very happy about this, but gardening without a car is actually surprisingly difficult. At least when setting up a garden, there is an awful lot of ’stuff’ that gardeners bring in to their gardens, usually not within carrying distance from their gardens. Plants, fertilizer, pots, paving, compost, gravel.

A lot of my time at Greyfriars seems to be taken up lugging stuff about, stuff bought and stuff donated, luckily my flat and Greyfriars has quite good bus routes. Some stuff is just too heavy, for me at least. Just one bag of sand was quite traumatic to try and get to the bus stop. Paving etc is just not possible.

At Greyfriars we’ve decided to line our beds with monobricks (these look just like bricks but much denser and withstand frost better), we have one lot donated (and delivered) to us by Forth Resource Management. This lined one and a half beds (we have three). Then there was a man in Trinity with more on free-cycle, to be picked up. None of the volunteers had cars either, one heroically volunteered to take some on his bicycle trailer yesterday. I was very excited about this fossil fuel-less option. Unfortunately, the trailer broke under the weight of the bricks and we spent the next couple of hours carrying them across town.

I don’t like the thought that one needs a car to try and grow things. Will we just have to start doing without such things? I suppose there must be stronger bike trailers, but I don’t think I would be strong enough to bike long distances with heavy loads. At the moment a horse, or even a donkey is not a credible option for me as I have nowhere to keep it, but I’m seriously thinking of getting one in the future! I think for now it would be good to get more creative about making do.

Gardening, like so much of our society , is extremely commercialised. There are so many things that we are convinced that we need. It can be extremely expensive, even when doing it to save money, eg growing your own veg. That’s one of the reasons with the course at St Brides we are trying to use re-used items as much as possible, most of which have just been picked up (or rather, scavenged in some cases).