We had a great Big Dig Day today. (The sun was shining, the garden was lush and lots of lovely people came to visit. We think our tally was around 40 – a little unsure, as our official visitors list blew away during the afternoon and had to be rescued.  You can see more photos of us and other Brighton & Hove ‘Big Dig’ gardens here. Our first visitors were from Newcastle, our last from Brighton & Hove: we were delighted to welcome Mayor Bill Randall towards the end of the afternoon.

It was great to receive visits from fellow community gardeners: Rachel from The greenhouse project at Emmaus Brighton & Hove, Anna from Willingdon Gardens in Eastbourne and Jan from New Roots Organic Co-op in Moulsecoomb. We also talked about the possibility of linking up with environmental science students for project work.

We swapped lots of notes and tips with fellow gardeners, and talked to others about developing allotments and pruning cordon apple trees. We met several people who wanted to compost. Everybody agreed it had been a bizarre and very unsatisfactory gardening year. We felt lucky that we had beans and courgettes, and our tomatoes are at least showing some signs of ripening. Harvest’s raspberry canes are doing well, and visitors could pick fruit off the canes.

We started out with the idea that we’d be able to get a bit of gardening done at some point, but as has often been the case, we ended up talking with visitors for most of the day. And in the end, that’s what the garden’s for … Thank-you to everybody who visited us!