Spring is in the air: we need your help!

A lovely view of the garden

Spring has sprung at Empty Common Community Garden. Charlotte emailed us that the solitary bee home did well this year for both healthy solitary bees and their parasites. We got 95 healthy mason bee cocoons, 16 unidentified bees in clay nests and plenty of parasitic wasps. 

Simone took a group of visitors from the University to visit Empty Common - a preview to a talk about the garden on Tuesday 15 March. 

We need more gardeners! There are lots of seeds to sow and prepare beds for. Seedlings are coming up in the polytunnel and will need transplanting outside when the soil has warmed up and there is less risk of frosts. Please get in touch with Charlotte to join - csynge@googlemail.com - or visit on a Sunday from around 10.30 to meet the current volunteers.

Visitors admire the shed with its lovely paintings

The hut is coming along fine, today's visitors were very impressed. Thank you to Utpal for taking all the photos in this blog post. We also discovered a book box, this is an initiative by Inci, a visiting scholar who has a small plot adjacent to the community garden.

Below is our most dedicated volunteer looking after a bed protected with a net so birds and other wildlife cannot munch the crop. We met her today and she had a chat with the visitors, urging them to join!

More lovely photos show how great the garden looks, even now when it's early for most crops.

The blue shed 

Utpal (first on left), our photographer