July update and exciting plans!

As I write this, the sun is streaming in through the window and I'm enjoying looking at our garden in full July glory.  We are also anticipating the reduction of the remaining Covid restrictions on Monday.  However, coupled with these we are sadly seeing an escalation in cases, and the news tells us that the government is not ruling out a new lockdown in some form at the beginning of the autumn.  The uncertainty is far from over.  Therefore the committee has decided that we will not be holding our Autumn show in September this year.  We don't want to set it all up and get people involved, just to cancel nearer the time.  Hopefully September 2022 will see a full return to normal.  We have also decided to have a year off running the Scarecrow competition.  In the last couple of years it's been increasingly difficult to get people to sign up, so we think that maybe it would be a good idea to give ourselves a break from it, and maybe return to it next year.

Not running these stalwart events from the Gardeners' calendar is not a decision we took easily.  But instead we have decided to use the change as an opportunity to create other ways to celebrate our community, gardening and the natural world.  So we are planning to run an Autumn Fest on the weekend of the 15th to 17th October instead.  This will be along the same lines as Spring Fest, which was such a success.  We hope to have a mixture again of live events (hopefully more than we were able to manage for Spring Fest) with some online activities as well.  Further information will follow in September, please put the dates in your diaries now.  And of course the Spud in a Bucket weigh in will still be going ahead on the 12th September, I hope that your spuds have been getting the attention they need to be the winners!  If mine are anything like the potatoes we planted out in the garden this year then I'm not optimistic.....We hope also that the children who have been growing Busy Lizzies have been getting pleasure from seeing their plants thrive under their care.

You might have noticed that the wildflower beds at the three entrances to the village are really coming into their own now, with the beds at the station catching up fast.  Although we used exactly the same seed mix for each, they are exhibiting in very different ways, demonstrating the differences in soil and light at the three locations.  I am so delighted that the hard work that the committee did in preparing and planting the beds is coming to fruition so successfully.  There are still many weeks of flowering left in them, we hope, to continue to raise the spirits.

Have a great summer.

Jane