Gardening group

A blooming good show!

Despite the challenging weather conditions this year, entrants in our first garden competition managed to grow some magnificent plants. Luckily we chose three glorious summer days for the judging and photography.

John Potter, Chair of the Gardening Club said: “It was an absolute pleasure going around and viewing these wonderful gardens, which were looking great in the sunshine. This is the second year that I have been involved, and it really makes you feel good to see the glorious displays. Brilliant, keep it up.”

We had fewer categories in our competition this year which made awarding prizes very difficult, but we eventually settled on the category winners as follows:

Best front garden:
1st Margaret Ashby
2nd Valerie Colvill
3rd William Alston

Small borders:
1st Daphne Priest
2nd Hazel Timms
3rd Alice Newton

Best back garden:
1st William Banning
2nd Rosemary Hedges
3rd Richard Penant-Jones

Tubs/baskets:
1st Michelle Davies
2nd Terence Wilkins
3rd William Hodd and Robin and Elizabeth Parslow (joint)

Best community garden:
1st Brooke Furmston Place
2nd Bowerdean Road
3rd Mayorfield House

Individual contribution to community garden:
Alan Stone - Parsonage Close, High Wycombe
Jean Shorter - Woollerton Court, Princes Risborough
Sheila Wallace - Woollerton Court, Princes Risborough

As well as these prizes the Gardening Club awarded garden competition packs to a number of worthy runners up. On Monday 10th September we held the awards ceremony and it was really great to see so many of you there. To see some more pictures, see our Garden competition pictures [pdf] 2MB.

Congratulations everyone – keep up your good work!

Gardening group

Our new garden group has now been set up and is made up of tenants, leaseholders and staff members who meet once a month, usually on a Tuesday morning. Here's a message from the Vice-Chair of the group, Sally Larman:

Welcome everyone! I wanted to share some information about the tenant and leaseholders gardening group. This popular group meets once a month at a chosen sheltered scheme and always welcomes new members. We talk about what the club can do in the community to improve the local environment, including the tenant and leaseholder garden areas. In the last edition you read about the Jubilee garden at Laburnum Road which we helped organise and most recently, we took part in the garden competition. At the moment, we are looking for a new project to start in Spring 2013 so if you have any suggestions, please let us know. We will also need to fundraise for the chosen project and we would love to hear your views and ideas on this. The gardening group, as well as the projects we work on, are great fun and very rewarding. If you would like to come to the next meeting, please contact the Tenant and Leaseholder Partnerships Team on 01494 476221 or email TP@redkitehousing.org.uk.

One of the group, Dennis Suthern, is a qualified landscape gardener. Recently he held a hanging basket workshop for tenants which was a great success. Here are some of the comments:

“I was impressed thank you I feel more confident when making up a hanging basket and I got some really good tips”

“It was really hands on and great that we could take the hanging basket that we made home”

We have recently been involved in building a Jubilee garden at Laburnham Road sheltered scheme where the communal garden has had a ‘ground force’ style makeover.  At the opening of the garden we held a plant swap stall where the local community could come along and swap plants or make a small donation for them.

We have also been looking at several plots of Red Kite land to see if they may be suitable to turn into allotments or for another project of some kind.

Our garden competition has been designed by the group and two members will be involved in actually judging it. We have also made some key decisions on the prizes and the prize giving event which is being held in September.

The gardening group has lots of new and exciting initiatives in the pipeline, one of which is how we as a group can support other tenants throughout the district that are unable to manage their gardens.

If you would like to know more or join our garden group, please let us know by contacting us at TP@redkitehousing.org.uk or on 01494 476221.