Seedling swap at the TransMission Community Garden

Come along to the garden on 10 May to exchange your unwanted seedlings for varieties you’re lacking, get to know the volunteers and find out more about community gardening

We’re holding another seedling swap at the TransMission Community Garden. We ran one last year and it was very successful, with people from all over the borough coming to trade seeds and seedlings.

This year’s seedling swap will take place this Saturday, 10 May from 10.30am to 1pm.

The idea is that you bring along your excess seedlings to swap for varieties that you don’t have and would like to try. We all get to share what we have with each other, coming together to promote local food growing and biodiversity. It’s a great opportunity to increase the types of vegetables, herbs and other plants you can grow at no cost – other than exchanging those that you already have enough of.

You’ll also get to meet people in the local community and find out more about the community garden.

We have plenty of seedlings to swap, including Paul Robeson Tomato, Cucumelon and Tomatillo. However, the more people get involved, the more seedlings and varieties will be on offer. So do tell everyone you know all about it!

If you’re not interested in the seedling swap but would still like to get involved with the community garden, you are very welcome. There are plenty of gardening chores to be done, such as weeding, watering the hedging plants or even a litter pick.

In fact, with the recent dry spell, water is at something of a premium, so if you can, please do bring some with you – as much as you can carry. We have a 1,000 litre water tank, so any that’s not used on the day can be stored at the garden.

If you can’t make it on 10 May, and would still like to help, watering will always be much appreciated – both by the plants and other volunteers. We have hedging plants all around the perimeter of the garden and keeping up with watering these in this weather is a big task so we’re always on the lookout for more volunteers.

The garden is looking good. We had a very productive work session in April, with lots of watering and weeding achieved. The loan of a petrol-driven lawn mower was especially helpful in tidying up the space – which shows that you don’t have to garden to get involved; we’re lacking in garden tools, as well as the funds to invest and space to store them, so if you’ve got anything we can borrow we’d be very grateful.

We also had a good turnout of volunteers, with five of us working. If you want to be part of it, come along on Saturday!

Next meeting

If gardening isn’t for you, but you’d still like to get involved, come along to our next meeting, on 12 May, at Ye Olde Rose & Crown on Hoe Street.