Our new keyhole garden

He will also send you rain for the seed you sow in the ground, and the food that comes from the land will be rich and plentiful. Isaiah 30.23

From a pile of soil and stones, with somehard work …

To a keyhole garden …

A group of us spent a happy afternoon building our Send a Cow (now known as Ripple Effect) style keyhole garden on the May Bank Holiday afternoon. This is part of our Eco Church journey, a way of growing some food together, to think about where our food comes from and also to demonstrate how people in Africa are taught to grow vegetables for their families.

The keyhole garden has a central composting area, which is typically fed with kitchen scraps and waste water. Seeds of a variety of vegetables are planted around the outside. The “keyhole” gives easier access to the composting area.

We would like our keyhole garden to be a community project. All the materials we used were ours or have been given to us. Magdalen Chapel gave us the topsoil, which Tim very kindly picked up for us, and left for us with a pile of stones. We also used composted soil which has formed from many years of church flowers, leaves and clippings.

We’ve now started to plant up the garden. Everything we have planted so far has been given to us – seeds and seedlings.

We would love to involve as many people as possible in the church and community. Let us know if you have any seedlings that might go in or would like to get involved. We’ve left a watering can on the nearby tap. Please feel free to do some watering if you are passing. Do explain it to any interested passers-by. If you would like to add to the compost, coffee and tea grounds are good, and raw vegetable matter, which will compost fairly quickly. Please do not put banana skins or citrus peel on.

When we get some produce, we will decide how to use it!