Gardenshare is an initiative whereby those with spare garden that they haven’t time or inspiration to manage get together with others who have the aspiration, knowledge, skills or time to nurture food or decorative plants or those which will attract wildlife and reduce maintenance needs in order to create a win-win exchange of garden space for creative endeavours! both can share in food or flowers produced and new friendships and community spirit can emerge to boot! At the moment we don’t have an active gardenshare project but we are open to getting it off the ground again in future.
In the same vein there are local initiatives to swap spare plants or seeds, whether they be spare tomato seedlings, willow whips or hardwood cuttings from your shrubs herbs or trees. Transition Tynedale runs a Plant Swap stall at the Hexham Farmers Market each spring and in 2020, when this was prevented by lockdown other opportunities flourished:
Two transition members have each started their own Facebook groups to swap plants:
Pixie Jewels set up Plant Swap Hexham which has grow to over 400 members and more recently, motivated by not wanting to drive to Hexham to swap plants, Kevin Smith started Plant Swap Bellingham which is approaching 200 members.
We are also impressed by the local initiative of Ginnie O’Farrell who has started Hexham Fresh Food Bank which encouraged many during lockdown to grow up some spare fruit or veg, some of them from swapped seeds or seedlings in order to donate surplus to the West northumberland Food Bank. They’ve been quiet over the last few months but now the snow has melted they can see their winter crops and plan the spring plantings with ambitions for more in 2021!
If you have some spare land that you would like to let others share the use of or would like to offer to tend an area small or large then Transition Tynedale is happy to try to connect you with each other. Contact us at info@transitiontynedale.org or come along to our monthly members meetings which are open to the public.
Key contact: info@transitiontynedale.org
Transition Tynedale 