Partial opening on Saturdays at the Hall

As the cycle of the seasons move from winter to spring, nature is awakening and seeds are sprouting, all of which gives us hope for the future after the difficult months which we have all faced recently. Our connectivity to nature is fundamental for our health and wellbeing which is why Fearon Hall wants to introduce gardening and fresh produce to everyone in our community.

We have lots of plans for the green spaces around us. Keep an eye out for our Therapeutic Gardening Group starting 15th May, we have also taken over some amenity planting, I suppose we should call ourselves The Fearon Guerrilla Gardeners, to grow edible plants as well as beautiful flowers. Our six large planters have been adopted by individual groups, keep an eye on them over the summer to see what the groups decide to plant.

Saturday 1st May 2021 saw us partially open our doors again to community. We say partially as the activities ran from outside. Our brand new initiative is to have a Swap, Drop & share event every Saturday 8am – 1pm which runs alongside the reopening of our café on a Saturday morning. We are trying to get local allotment holders and private gardeners on board with this, so that when they have a large crop which they couldn’t possible use, we offer them the chance to share it with others who don’t have the knowledge or space to grow their own.

Swap Drop will happen at the Parish Green entrance of Fearon Hall from May to October, last Saturday was our first, and what a day we had! Fearon Hall would like to become a hub for the distribution of surplus home grown plants, vegetables or fruits. We ask our neighbours and allotment holders to bring in their surplus to share with others.

Running alongside our Swap Drop, as the café cannot open until mid-May, we sold tea, coffee and cakes which raised around £80 all of which will go towards more activities at the Hall.

Loughborough Students LAGS (Landscaping & Gardening Society) & Transition Loughborough also held a plant stall on the same day.  Here is an update from Martha who leads this project…

This is a brief update on the LAGS pop-up plant stall last Saturday, 1st May, outside Fearon Hall.

Many thanks go to Meg and Dawn to allow us to do the event there, and also to the 6 LAGS members who helped to set up, run the event and tidy up at the end. The weather was cold but bright, and the position along the side of the Hall was ideal for meeting and talking to people at a safe distance. We were very pleased that this event was an opportunity to meet old friends and acquaintances, and it was especially nice to hear from some people that they had been successful with our plants in the past.

We had seeds and seedlings and bigger plants to share; we see our plant stall as part of the Fearon Hall produce swap too, which started on that day and will run throughout the season. We also hope to be part of the Fearon Hall Growing Project which Dawn and Catherine see as the beginning of an INCREDIBLE EDIBLE LOUGHBOROUGH, and we hope that we can have other plant stalls at Fearon Hall – possibly once a month – as we usually propagate more plants than we can use at the campus garden.

Last but not least, we were pleased to get £102 in donations which we were sharing with Fearon Hall and the Transition Community Allotment.

Members of Charnwood Chai also met on Saturday 1st May, they sat on the patio and enjoyed tea and a long overdue chat with friends.

Keep an eye out for our next blog – The Garden of Fearon.