We were taken aback … We were awarded the Edward Furey cup for our ‘community spirit’ at Brighton & Hove City in Bloom award ceremony last Thursday.

We also were awarded second place for ‘Best Community Garden’, with a very well deserved first place going to the Moulescoomb Forest Garden.

So it really is time for celebration. We were awarded Southern Railway’s Best Community Station back at the end of August, and now the Community Spirit cup. Our RHS inspection confirmed again that we were ‘thriving’. Yay!

And to top it all, we have harvested our first lot of apples from our cordoned trees, and they are absolutely delicious. Things are coming to fruition … it’s funny to think that we started off two years ago imagining we’d just be getting together every now and then to do a bit of gardening at the station.

I bumped into a friend on my way to the City in Bloom award ceremony at one of the Brighton seafront hotels. ‘You’re clearly not in gardening mode’, she said, observing my navy dress, shoes with heels and (relatively) clean nails. ‘Ah, but I am’, I replied.

We regularly find ourselves bemused by the diversity of settings we end up in, as a result of our community garden at London Road Station: the Town Hall or the Amex Stadium for the Brighton to Seaford Rail Partnership Steering Group, the Grand Hotel for the Southern Stakeholder Day, the Jubilee Library for the City in Bloom launch, the Bevendean community garden at the edge of the Downs for an evening picnic. There’s no doubting that all these networking events spur our motivation and our sense of engagement.