Working with Derbyshire Wildlife Trust (DWT)

WE ARE BRILLIANT - STILL LOTS MORE TO DO TO BE OUTSTANDING

This time last week Alys and Andy welcomed to Grove Allotment Gardens, Emily Howes from Derbyshire Wildlife Trust (DWT). Emily is Community Rewilding Lead for North-East Derbyshire. Since our AGM we have been focused on improving our two sites – making sure we are well managed with land that is used to the best possible environmental standards.

So, we were delighted by her comments to us following her visit. "I very much enjoyed seeing the allotment and learning about your progress so far. It's a brilliant site and an asset for the community, and I was particularly impressed by the areas that combined wildflowers and food crops; balancing the relationship between nature and food production is a major focus for many of our (DWT) teams."

We will be working with DWT through the Chesterfield Allotment Network, to develop and use an audit framework. This will show us the environmental quality of our allotment gardens. Being able to do this is an important element of the work we are all doing to promote and protect Grove into the future.

Whilst we have to wait to get a way of measuring how well we are doing, all of us can look at the way we manage our own bit of precious green space and think about different elements of best environmental practice. For example soil health is fundamental and allotment gardening lends itself to healthy soil if we follow a few basic principles. The National Allotment Society Soil Health leaflet explains the very best ways we can nuture the soil on our plots.

As members of our allotment assocation co-operative society we all get membership of the NAS and access to loads of information and great advice for allotmenteers. To access NAS membership benefits you need to have given Alys your email address, as our Secretary has to register you.