News

Edible Estates has won a contract from Edinburgh Council to work with residents of Wardieburn in North Edinburgh to develop ideas for the regeneration of four community greenspaces.  Whilst the future use of the spaces is yet to be decided, it is likely that there will be a significant element of food growing for individuals and perhaps even for a …

Here’s some news about the Incredible Edible project in Todmorden down Yorkshire way. When the small British mill town of Todmorden, tucked in between Yorkshire and Lancashire, first began installing fruit and vegetable gardens all around the area as part of theIncredible Edibleprogram, it likely had no idea that the novel, yet simple, concept would make the town a foremost …

Over the past year, Re:Solution has been working on promoting our community growing initiative in Council estates.  We have decided to rebrand the initiative to make it more distinct from other community gardening services. Henceforth we will be calling the initiative ‘Edible Estates’, the name refers to the target communities for the initiative – Council and other social housing estates, …

We are pleased to report that Lochend Secret Garden have received planning permission for their community growing project.  Re:Solution is providing design and development services to the project for the client, Carr Gomm, a national health and wellbeing organisation. The project is designed to be community led and delivered.  Over the past month, a team of local residents have been …

The Lochend Community Growing Project has received confirmation of match funding from SNH and Edinburgh Council.  There are still some t’s to cross and i’s to dot, but I hope we can have a project start in August.  It’ll be great to get on site whilst there are still long summer days.  We hope that we can have the first …

Had a great meeting today with CEC Council Officer to look at the GIS mapping tools available to the Council. There is great potential to use GIS to pull together information regarding parcels of land, ownership of adjoining households, condition and management of land etc. to develop a tool for planning the development of community gardening projects in Council estates.

The Big Lottery announced the Community Spaces fund in June.  The fund has been conceived to support projects like village halls and community gardens.  I went along to one of the roadshows last week to get a better of understanding of how the fund will operate. I would recommend it to anyone thinking of applying to the lotteries to go …

Thats the first stage of the Re:Solution website published.  This will allow us to get on with promoting the community growing initiative.  The second stage of the roll out will include more information about projects, and a video about community growing.

We’ll be coming to the end of the Lochend & Restalrig Community Growing Study in March (website). Its gone really well, identified a great site and a lot of interest from local households and organisation. Hopefully we’ll be securing some sizeable grant support from the Council soon. With any luck we can start on site in May ’11.

This April I’ll be going part-time with Edinburgh Community Backgreens Association. The intention is that it will enable me to spend time developing more ‘community growing’ projects, and to return to research and development in Co-housing. Its a bit nerve wracking but exciting too. Hopefully it will be a new chapter, and open up new opportunities.