Shiona caught this beauty on her Plot 71B this week.
Photo Credit: Shiona Wedderburn Plot 71A
Web research suggests it’s a Peacock Butterfly, but maybe others can confirm? A lovely visitor for sure.
Category: News Page 58 of 82
Every day we welcome visitors to Garthdee Field is special, but today was just plain perfect.
Miss Rennie’s Primary Fours were a delight from start to finish and keen to get stuck into tattie planting, seed sowing, pricking out and herb growing.
Thanks go to Marion, Gill, Jacqui and new to the GFAA team, Phil and Graeme.
It’s going to be a good year!
We had a special day on site today, thanks to the heroic efforts of a special sponsored volunteer squad, pulled together by Ross from Plot 99A
Left to right: Danny, Ranatta, Victoria, Fiona, Ellie, Ross
They worked tirelessly and managed to complete the weeding of the old wild flower meadow and make a great start on filling the new raised beds with spent compost and leaf mould. Better still they were great fun to work with and very much up for a laugh. Best of all – they brought a bit of sunshine and warm weather with them. About time too!
Our thanks go to the whole team for a fantastic effort and to Ross for organising everything.
Plotters will remember that Karolina Gombert visited us some weeks back conducting interviews for this study. Karolina has been kind enough to send us an interim report of findings – stressing that these are interim and provisional at this stage and subject to change before final reporting. Karolina and the team have picked out these common themes from their interviews and they make for very interesting reading:
Lifestyle
-participants considered food growing a lifestyle choice (with its natural benefits)
-this had a number of benefits, ie. health benefits, being outdoors, socialising and recreation
-thus, food growing had not necessarily influenced health/environmental awareness, and eating behaviours much; but participants were aware before. According to participants, the environmental awareness changed most with food growing.
Motivations
-many participants had a family background in food growing
-the motivations were closely linked to perceived benefits and thus lifestyle
Barriers/Challenges
-there were challenges, but none of these hindered participants to grow their own foods
-some challenges were welcomed, as they would help improve the food growing techniques
-challenges mentioned the most were theft/vandalism, pests, and weather.
Contradictions
-Whilst many participants were active in their communities (e.g. promoting food growing, holding voluntary posts at the community gardens, teaching others), the majority of participants were not involved in food poverty alleviation initiatives
-whilst participants were generally interested in learning more about and supporting those in food poverty, they were realistic about their restrictions, e.g. time, to do so
-food growing was mainly seen as a personal activity (that could still benefit the environment and society as a whole), but not as an activity beneficial for society per se
-participants were aware of the missing links, i.e. between those who grow fresh foods, and those who could benefit from the surplus
-these perspectives raise questions about how realistic policy recommendation on food growing as a strategy to alleviate food poverty are
Ideas for improvement
During the interview, participants mentioned a number of ideas for improvement, which shall be taken into consideration, for activities in line with the sustainable food cities in Aberdeen City and Shire
supporting older people in gardening
-much more government/council support (official organisation) for supporting those in food poverty to grown their own
-make better use of surplus food
-develop engagement strategies
-make better use of the unused land
-promote respect for people’s properties at allotments
-maintain a ‘bottom up’ / ‘grassroots’ approach to involving communities
-educate on food growing, and implement this education better
Karolina promises she or team members will be in touch once the study is completed.
It was a pleasure to welcome Carole on site today. The warmth of her personality was very much-needed to brighten what was an exceptionally dull, cold day – more like February than April.
Carole was gathering material for her Radio Scotland programme, “Out for the Weekend” which comes out on Friday afternoon.
Our site has a new photo showing feature. From now on photo collections will appear via the Galleries link above. Photos should look better and load faster. Please let me know how you get on using it.
The first set has some nice photos from our recent Community Sunday – as you see, great fun was had by all and with a good turnout we got lots of valuable things done. There wasn’t much doubt about who won the Chocolate Easter Egg Hunt! Thanks to all who managed along.
In the meantime the Photos Page link will be left in place as a way of looking back to previous photo collections, but I’ll hope to move them over to the new Galleries area if it proves reliable and popular.