Wild Shed
Wild Shed is a weekly group that meets at the Beeches Day Centre in Cainscross and works on different projects across the Stroud Valleys - there are usually between six and eight volunteers. We are involved in growing food, building wildlife homes or taking part in nature walks. This group has been active since 2018, helping to produce organic food at Bisley and Cainscross that our volunteers can enjoy.
The Wild Shed Group is funded by Thriving Communities, a fund from Gloucestershire County Council - further details on the Thriving Communities initiative can be found here. The Thriving Communities funding also runs a website called ‘Your Circle’. It is a directory to help you find your way around care and support, and connect with people, places and activities in Gloucestershire, where you can find lots of useful organisations and information. Try it at https://www.yourcircle.org.uk/.
Spring 2024: Part of our community by Ruth Powell
In January, the Wild Shed gang created a woven willow fence along a path by the river at the Long Table, under the guidance of willow expert Norah Kennedy. The fence was really well received by staff at the Long Table and they did some lovely social media about it.
Although the Long Table’s future at Brimscombe Mill is currently under threat, we are continuing to work with them and will be helping clear land at Aston Down for herb and vegetable gardening to supply the kitchen.
In February, we helped Katherine and her team to dig over some of the vegetable and herb beds at Prinknash walled garden, and while Susie was on leave, some of the team joined the canal project work parties at Whitminster, which they really enjoyed, despite the weather and mud! They learned some new skills here like cutting back large branches and small trees and post ramming - they’ve also helped carry the tools for the 1/4 mile walk across the fields!
Our third visit to Westonbirt saw the group planting trees in Silk Wood as part of a community-based project to replace an area of Ash trees that had to be felled due to Ash dieback disease and, with the start of spring, the group have been busy sowing veg seeds and potting on plants in the polytunnel at the Beeches.
Autumn 2023: Reaping our rewards by Ruth Powell and Susie Goodhall
The Wild Shed group have been busy looking after the fruit and veg gardens at the Beeches in Cashes Green and the Bisley allotment, and summer saw a glut of blackcurrants and courgettes, plus healthy crops of red onions, aubergines, salad leaves and runner beans.
The blackcurrants were turned into a compote by Ruth and shared with the volunteers, and great fun was had cooking the vegetables on a camping stove at the Beeches and eating our produce fresh from the garden.
We’ve continued to visit the Long Table regularly, weeding around the hedge and building a dead hedge (a hedge using cut material, which provides habitats for wildlife) along the riverbank, with the bonus of enjoying their fabulous lunches.
We joined Fred’s group at Capel’s Mill to help with scything the meadow and clearing scrub back along the footpath.
We also had two wonderful days out at Westonbirt Arboretum, where we’ve joined guided walks and taken part in a nature craft called Hapa-Zome (the Japanese art of pounding plants) to create amazing cloth pictures to take home.
Have a look at lots more photos of our work here:
Wild Shed: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjANLdS
and
Summer 2023 – Wild Shed fun
We welcomed Susie to the Wild Shed project team in April – she has taken over from Katherine, leading the group on alternative Thursdays from Ruth.
The much-anticipated new shed was put up at our Bisley allotment in March with help from the Creative Shed team. It’s much bigger than our old one, as well as being robust and weatherproof, unlike the old one which has seen better days 😊. We celebrated this milestone with cake* in May and were joined by Clare and Martin who admired our handywork and we enjoyed beautiful music strummed by Luke on his guitar in the spring sunshine.
*No photos of the cake exist, it was eaten with gusto before photos could be taken 😉
Mike found this lovely slowworm hiding under the old shed when we cleared it out.
The spring weather has led to a big battle with couch grass in the strawberry beds, but we have won for the moment and laid straw beneath the plants to protect the developing fruit.
At the Beeches we have been very busy potting on and planting out a variety of vegetables including runner beans, broad beans, peas, leeks, onions, courgettes, and squash in the veg beds, and aubergines, dwarf beans and basil in the polytunnel. A dragonfly exuvia was spotted in the pond – it leaves the dried shell of the larvae behind after it crawls out of the water and emerges as a dragonfly.
We have had several days at the Long Table, weeding the hedge and building a dead hedge along the edge of the seating area by the river. The team have particularly enjoyed the lovely food and hot drinks on offer, which make a great change from our usual packed lunches.
As a reward for everyone’s hard work, the team visited Westonbirt Arboretum as part of their Community Access Scheme and were lucky to have beautiful weather and an expert volunteer to take us on a guided walk through the Old Arboretum. We learned about some of the special trees as ell as the history of Westonbirt and finished off with a picnic under the trees and an ice cream.
Shed-line news! by Ruth Powell
The Wildshed team have spent lots of time over the winter months getting the new (pre-loved) shed ready to put up at the Bisley allotment. The shed was repaired, painted and finally installed – on a very wild, wet and windy day – with the help of Richard and the Creative Shed team.
We’re looking forward to putting it to good use!
The team has also been getting ready for the growing season ahead, sowing seeds and preparing the veg beds at the Beeches.
We’ve started working at the Long Table in Brimscombe, where we’re helping to green up their outdoor space, clearing weedy ground and planning herb beds to support the kitchen.
Other activities we’ve enjoyed have included helping at the great hedge planting effort at Hammonds farm, and clearing brash and other tasks at Sladebank Woods.
We are all very sad to see Katherine leave Wildshed, although we’re delighted she’s continuing at Prinknash.
She will be very much missed by the Wildshed team.
Winter 2022-23: A bumper year by Tamsin Bent
Our volunteers had a lot of watering to do at The Beeches garden this summer as part of our Wild Shed project, but it was worth it, with a bumper crop of tomatoes and cucumbers in the polytunnel.
There were also impressive crops of strawberries and blackcurrants at our Bisley allotment.
A woven hazel fence was erected at Bisley with the help of an expert woodsman, and our volunteers are now preparing the ground for a new shed – watch this space!
Earlier activities
From Tiny Seeds…
In January, the Wild Shed group spent four sessions with our woodland creation project at Salmon Springs. Working alongside our tree planting officer, Stuart, and his regular group of volunteers was a joy in itself, but the Wild Shed group had a particularly satisfying task at hand – we were planting out trees that the group had grown themselves from seed collected by their own fair hands.
Volunteers with Saplings grown from seed
Our previous Wild Shed project officer (the wonderful Nadine Smykatz-Kloss) had, over the years, taken the Wild Shed-ers to several different locations in and around Stroud for collecting tree seed. Beech, guelder rose, hawthorn and blackthorn were among the species harvested, and each was carefully prepared for germination according to its needs – some seeds require several weeks at cold temperatures (the fridge is ideal) in order to germinate successfully. Once out of their ‘cold storage’, the seeds were then sown in pots at the Beeches Centre and protected from the birds for the first year of their lives. Successful one-year old saplings were then transplanted to the tree nursery bed to grow on.
We’ve been carefully tending the young saplings and this January, we were delighted to be able to release some of them into the wild! Beech was the main species planted out, with some alder too. There is plenty of guelder rose and hawthorn still in the nursery bed which will probably reach planting out size by next year.
This year we will be raising alder and silver birch from seed collected locally.
Some history:
The group has been spending almost every other Thursday up at our allotment in Bisley. We have six raised beds there, two of which are full of strawberry plants. Early in the year we fed them well with leaf mould from the Bisley Community Composting Scheme, and they responded with a fantastic strawberry crop in early summer – we had several weeks of strawberries with cream for lunchtime pudding.
Another bed contains mature blackcurrant plants and these also cropped heavily. Some were munched on the spot – too delicious to resist – though the majority are safely stashed in a freezer, awaiting their transformation into muffins and cakes for the group to enjoy.
We have been lucky enough to be joined by Hugh Manistre, a local bird enthusiast, for a day of bird ID around our allotment. Swifts and swallows were in good supply and we watched a family of house martins swooping up under the eaves of the houses nearby. A happy ten minutes was spent watching a pair of beautiful speckled mistle thrushes hunting for worms and insects on a farmhouse front lawn. We were also able to catch sight of several yellowhammers and to listen to them calling to one another, something that many of us had never knowingly seen or heard before. Everyone said they thoroughly enjoyed the day so huge thanks to Hugh for sharing his time and enthusiasm so generously.
As the autumn has drawn in, the calendula plants that we grew ourselves and planted out have flowered and set their own seed; we are collecting this so that we can grow our own plants next spring. The berry harvest continues as the autumn raspberries come in to season, and our thoughts are turning to planning what we will grow next year on our allotment here, 800 feet up in the Cotswolds.
The group is often busy with seed extraction from berries. There have been some surprises - Guelder rose seeds, when extracted from foul smelling berries, are lovely bright red little hearts. Also, Spindle seeds are a bright orange and Elder seeds are so small that they escape through the colander when trying to separate the seeds from the fruit. With the help of the warmth of the propagator and the cold of the garden we will be speeding up their normal dormancy periods, so that we are expecting small trees to spring up next season without having to wait a whole year for them to come up.
