Summer Update

With the longest day behind us, we’re officially in British summer time! For the garden this means bigger harvests, more weeding, more pruning and a lot more watering. We’re lucky enough to have two 1000 litre on in our garden, These get filled naturally by rain water by a pipe system connected to the roofing of our tool shed. We always have our fingers crossed that we’ll have had enough rain over spring to keep us going, or that a short shower might happen during summer to top us up.

Our summer harvest so far has brought us an abundance of strawberries, salads, peas, mangetouts and more raspberries than we can handle! Artichoke was a new one for us as well, which if we’re honest we probably won’t grow again… You can’t go wrong with a classic spud!

Elderflower cordial has been made, which is our officially marker of the beginning of summer. The sweet syrup of elderflower cordial mixed with ice cold lemonade is only made more perfect by knowing the seeds you sown in winter that have bloomed to become thriving plants.

Thanks to our amazing community gardeners who have…

• Fixed the polytunnel – again!
• Created their own wildflower patches in the main park for everyone to enjoy
• Created new beds and dismantled old one
• Sown lots of seeds, taken lots of cuttings and harvested lots of food
• Generally chatted, made new people feel welcome and been ambassadors for Bootle!

We loved our jubilee celebration of community. In June we opened North Park Community
Garden for a celebration Gateway style! Over 60 people attended and enjoyed games,
pizza and some amazing home made cakes. It was so good to actually spend some time in
the garden chatting, relaxing and having fun. The highlight of the afternoon was
definitely the impressive dance moves on display!

Work is progressing towards having our very own kitchen on site. We were delighted to
have been successful in gaining funding from the Asda Foundation and combined with the
support of our local Linacre Ward Councillors and Bootle based international firm Cargills
we now have enough funding to start work. The first jobs have been to locate the water
and electricity supplies but after that planning awaits!