A good life... (AGGIL 5)

​As I looked across the Community Gardens this morning, before our rather wet and curtailed Saturday Social, I was overwhelmed with emotions for the journey this place set me off on almost five years ago.

A week before Christmas in 2014, I received the keys to a very local community gardens and the tenancy of the 3m by 3m growing space below.  It was weedy yet had a pretty prolific perpetual spinach, a fabulous thyme and a fragrant fennel in situ. A few hours later, using our communal tools, I'd cleared all the weeds, dug the rich soil over and begun thinking about the growing year ahead.

It's from this quiet, contented few hours that my love of growing vegetables and fruits really began to return, and I started to benefit from working with my hands in the earth once more.

Over the next 10 months some things grew really well whilst others did the bare minimum of what I had hoped for; though to be frank everything was a success in my rose-tinted eyes!

At our Association AGM the following October, I put up my hand when they called for new committee members.  At my first committee meeting a week or so later the Chair stood down, and I found myself the only person in the room with a little time on my hands.  I thought it would be a fun and worthwhile project, and anyway I had an hour or two a month to spare.  It's fair to say that I totally underestimated the amount of time and commitment this decision would eventually entail, and I also totally underestimated the amount of fun, value, friendship and fabulous community engagement I'd encounter along the way.

Having now been active in guiding the running of the Community Gardens for the past four years, alongside a fabulous and supportive committee, I'll be standing down as Chair at our AGM in early November. It seems the right time for myself AND the Community Gardens.  With any organisation, the time comes for some to move on and for others take the reins; new energy and guidance reinvigorates to take things further and continue the success. 

At our AGM we'll also be celebrating ten years from breaking ground on the Community Gardens - ten years of growing food, flowers, enhancing the ecology and environment and doing our bit in community development and enhancement.  It seems the perfect time for another to take up the baton.

I'll keep my plot at the Community Gardens for another year, and remain on the committee.  I'll be taking a back seat, though supporting whenever I'm needed and able.  Our new Chair is already a very active member of the committee so the Community Gardens will be in solid and safe hands.

Little did I know when I took on my small growing space five years ago that it would lead to me being the Chair of trustees of Social Farms & Gardens today; an organisation that at the time I didn't even know.  As a national charity, with members and offices in all four countries of the UK, we support and are a voice for over 1,300 community gardens, city farms, care farms, forest schools, school farms, orchard projects and lots of other community managed green spaces.  My small role in this organisation is something I'm proud off and derive both benefit and satisfaction from.

There is no doubt that sometimes I find my time challenged.  Though I work largely from my home office, and am regularly able to take an hour out of my day to attend the plots, my clients obviously need my time and energy too.  Though I'm lucky to now love much of my work, the satisfaction I get from my voluntary work really grounds me, as do the benefits that I get from taking time to grow at my Community Gardens plot and our allotment plots.

So, as I stood this morning amidst a tangle of weeds and mud, with a tinge of cold in the air and rain tumbling down, I appreciated that though ours is by no means a perfect life, it is a good life.  

​A Guernsey Gardener in London, Day 5