The Triangle Garden and its allotment are situated in a small informal park with a central pavilion building, part of which has been converted for our use as an indoor base. The allotment is very near the Pavilion representing our ‘zone one’ and is where we grow annual vegetables and some soft fruit and herbs. Immediately outside the pavilion we grow decorative, scented and edible climbers.
The Triangle Garden is a short stroll across the park and is a wilder place than the allotment, where we have created a number of features with various food and non-food yields: a pollinators' garden, a wildlife pond, a willow maze, an area of drought- and shade-tolerant herbaceous planting, a bug hotel, dye plants, herbs and a bluebell glade. We also have a mini-orchard of traditional local varieties in cordon and fan form and a forest garden along the river Hiz which forms the garden’s north-western boundary.
We mulch with compost from the Garden, decomposed chipped tree waste from local tree surgery work and comfrey, which we grow in abundance. At our allotment we grow annual vegetables in raised beds using a no dig system with organic mulches to enrich the soil and keep it moist. We collect rainwater from roof runoff to water the veg. We compost all leafy material including as much from the council’s park contractors as we can get hold of, plus paper towels, peelings and tea bags from our building. We leave twiggy bits as habitat piles and ‘dead hedges’. We use vertical surfaces for growing wherever possible: fences, walls and trees.
Our small but well-ventilated building has multiple uses: as a craft workshop space, an education space, a base for our work and a meetings venue. We also have an open-sided timber shelter and outdoor kicthen on our allotment allowing us to continue safe working with our vulnerable clients through the pandemic.
We leave parts of the garden and allotment wild to attract wildlife and allow naturally occurring plant species such as nettle, hedge garlic and butterbur to thrive in those areas. We allow plants such as Cow Parsley and Forget-me-not to flower freely, cutting them back when they encroach too much on what we have planted. We have persuaded the Council to dedicate a tract of low-lying land within the park to meadow and have planted and sown native wildflowers there. To reduce nutrient build up and create better conditions for the wildflowers the mowings are taken off the area every autumn. The Council only mow this area once a year now in September. We have also persuaded the Council to adopt a more wildlife-friendly management regime on the river adjacent to the Garden so that the banks are cut in rotation leaving continuous habitat for wildlife at all times.
We regularly seek feedback on all aspects of what we do and review our policies and processes on a rolling basis. We work on the basis of slow and gradual change, observation, reflection and improvement, which can be frustrating to those who seek dramatic results, but is the only way we as volunteers can sustain forward motion.
We have used permaculture principles to address the way we operate as a core group, in order to fairly share the workload and allow maximum participation in our workshop programme. We have gone from having a trustee body who carried out all the policy making, strategic thinking, project and garden management planning, publicity and events management and running virtually everything hands on, to creating several sub-committees made up of interested volunteers with a range of skills and enthusiasm with at least one trustee on each, allowing the trustees to focus much more on strategy and policy. This also allows people who don’t want the responsibility of trusteeship to have a positive and meaningful role in the management of the organisation.