Halswell Community Garden

Do you love to garden? Do you like company? Come and share with like-minded people at the Halswell Community Garden.

Don’t let lack of space or knowledge of growing things stop you from being involved in gardening. The Halswell Community Garden welcomes people with all levels of knowledge. The garden works on a communal basis. If you help in the garden, at any level, you can share in the bounty it provides.

 Tucked in behind the Vicarage restaurant and accessed via the domain or St Mary’s church, the community garden is a thriving food producing area. We meet regularly on Saturday mornings from 10.30 when we do our weekly harvest, and people are welcome to work in the garden any day they want to. It is spring and there is lots of work to do for a summer harvest.

Even with the wet weather there’s a lot of work already done. We have moved the two ‘spare’ beds over, one has been sprayed and filled with compost and the gooseberry bushes that were taking up space elsewhere have been moved over into it. 

Some early potatoes have been planted, the asparagus are a bit slow in their new bed but it can take a few years for them to come away. We have moved two of the Feijoas to better conditions and the bed that the Kindy had last year has been moved as we want to put a hard surface there to put the two bbq tables on. That will be a big job as we need to have the area framed, some dirt dug out then some hard fill put in. We’ll need people power for that.

We have blueberries and blackcurrants to put in a bed but these will have to wait now as they are already in flower. The irrigation is yet to be installed for the beds, again we’ll need some more hands. The boundary needs weeding again.  The green crop has been dug in but it needs digging over again. That will make a good bed for root crops. Our new greenhouse is ready for any cucumbers/tomatoes that come our way.

Are you growing the New World “My Little Garden”? Don’t know what to do with the seedlings when they come up? Bring them down to the community garden to grow on. Come and help – weed, plant, chop, fill, anything you can do and you’ll get to share, not just the results of your little part, but everything that the garden produces over the season.

For more information, contact Ellen: loadersande@xtra.co.nz, or pop down to the garden on Saturday morning.