About Us
About the Grove Community Garden
Founded in 2021, the Garden had humble beginnings as a patch of tomatoes and wild flowers carved into the thick brambles that had overgrown the entire pub garden behind the Grove Tavern. With absolutely no knowledge of gardening, the tomatoes - which had been planted into less than an inch of compost on top of bare clay - died, and over winter the garden fell back into disrepair.
The following February, with renewed motivation, we began to clear a bigger space to work in and a real desire to educate ourselves on cultivation. With support from a few local folk, we were able scavenge timber to build our first raised beds, and began growing a wholesome community as well as a much more successful harvest than the previous year! As more people gravitated towards the space, we started looking at the rest of the space.
Over the 8 years or so that the pub was abandoned the garden had been used for fly tipping and heavy drug abuse. The ground around our horse chestnut tree was littered with mattresses, cookers, tents, sofas, trampolines, stolen booze bottles and used needles. We decided to take on the enormous task of clearing the whole site, to use all available space to grow vegetables and flowers. We're proud to say a year later we've finally achieved this.
In February 2023 we removed the last of the fly tipped waste, and have transformed the whole space. Picking degraded plastic out of the ground is an ongoing battle that we're committed to winning, but we're happy to say our vegetable and flower beds are now totally plastic free. With this weight off our minds, we're moving forwards with big plans for the future of our garden and the site as whole.
Beyond gardening, we want to use the space to offer free resources to the community such as workshops, training days, talks and meet-ups of all kinds.