Green-fingered volunteers are wanted to develop the gardens at Salford’s Buile Hill Park.
The project is being run by Growing Togetherness, a Salford-based community interest company, whose mission is to unite the local community through gardening, horticulture and a shared appreciation of nature and green spaces.
Organiser Mark Frith is working with the university’s sustainability team to recruit volunteers to help with gardening maintenance, craft activities, and serving refreshments.
The sessions will run from the community allotments at the Seedley Pavilion Community Cafe in Buile Hill Park.
They are planned for November 30, December 7 and January 4 and 11, starting at 1pm.
Excited to have our joint project starting on Wednesday 😊🙏 https://t.co/m528ycGZMI
— Mark Frith (@MarkFrith2020) November 27, 2022
Mr Frith said: “The University of Salford’s sustainability team are working alongside us to run sessions here for students, where they can feel part of the community.
“We’ve got a lot of regular customers and volunteers. We want to open the door to the students to come and join us.
“The first task we’re going to do is a willow coppice. We’ve used it to create a living willow hedge which we can carry on using as a coppice, but we also make things out of it as well, such as Christmas wreaths.”
Mr Frith studied sustainable communities and regeneration at Salford University, but transferred into wildlife conservation. While at university, he became passionate about making a positive impact in the Salford community.
He has been involved in many horticultural projects throughout Salford, including work on the Heritage Lottery bid for Peel Park and the consultation for the flood basin project at Castle Irwell, in association with the Broughton Trust.
During lock-down, Mark was asked by Salford City Council to manage the plot by Seedley Pavillion in Buile Hill Park, a site which he was commissioned to turn from a bowling green into community allotments.
The friendly atmosphere helped to lift spirits at what many found to be a daunting and lonely time.
“As Covid grew, and we all had a weird and wonderful experience, life on the allotments was fantastic,” he said.
“One of the few things you could legally do was go out, tend your allotments and grow food. That’s kind of how we got the 50 plots cleared out and working again during lock-down.”
He is now appealing for more volunteers to go down, grow food and help tend to the allotments now that many supporters have had to go back to work.
Growing Togetherness has received funding to develop the Seedley Pavilion site. A portion of the funding is going into the building of a greenhouse.
“The dream is that we want a pizza oven, barbecue and fireplace, with a canopy over the patio, to make a space where we can carry on functioning in the fresh air if there were to be another lockdown,” he explained.
“The more people, especially students and younger people that come and enjoy the space; that shows the funders that we’ve got that reach to organisations, and for the generation’s that want to be a part of it,” he added.
Growing Togetherness is working in association with Salford’s Incredible Edible – a nationwide initiative that encourages people to grow food safely in urban areas.
Mr Frith said: “We’re very lucky that this site has been parkland since 1876, and prior to that it was farmland so it’s not had much contaminants, so we are able to grow food in the soil and the raised beds.
“Across the road from the campus at the Working Class Movement Library, we’ve got kiwis growing on the vine literally on the streets of Salford.
“We’re trying to educate people to show what you can grow in an urban environment, and particularly with tropical fruits, as they thrive on the heat from urban areas,” he said.
Salford University students can sign up for the volunteering sessions here.
To find out more about the work that Mark Frith and Growing Togetherness do in Salford, check out their website here.
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