Seacroft Forest Garden: Leeds couple invite volunteers to help maintain ‘little piece of nature in sprawling council estate’

Yorkshire Evening Post

Seacroft Forest Garden: Leeds couple invite volunteers to help maintain ‘little piece of nature in sprawling council estate’. Credit: Sean Lovell

Transcript

00:00 [Music]

00:17 It's just a little piece of nature in a sprawling council estate

00:22 [Music]

00:25 All this area here, it's cut down now, a lot of it, but it was up here when we came through

00:30 and we had to literally cut through everything. We had a skimmer that just worked for days on end

00:36 I think it took a week to get through everything

00:38 Yeah, the garden's changed in a lot of different ways. We couldn't get in the gate, it was so overgrown

00:44 It's now accessible. You can now walk around parts of it, main parts of it

00:50 It'd been derelict for, oh, I don't know, going on 20 years. You can imagine 20 years of not doing anything

00:56 people throwing things over the fence, so it was a real mess when we first came in

01:00 We walked past up and down the gillow all the time and we kept looking in and thinking, 'God, that's ridiculous'

01:05 There was lawnmower, you know, there was bits of mattresses and everything else in

01:08 and Linda thought, 'Well, let's try and help somebody'

01:11 and originally it was going to be an allotment, but they said, 'No, we couldn't do it'

01:15 because there were certain legal things on it

01:17 and then Linda thought, 'Why not a forest garden?' The same idea as permaculture

01:22 and it was Linda's idea really, she walked past it and went, 'Let's change it'

01:25 and as a dutiful husband I went, 'Yeah, alright, love'

01:28 We've got about 21 fruit trees now and various fruit bushes, perennial vegetables growing

01:36 Rhubarb, blueberries growing, whiteberries, jostleberries, goji berries, pumpkins, herbs

01:43 Carrots, courgettes, lettuce, potatoes and such like

01:49 We've started planting a good old stable Yorkshire diet of licorice

01:54 and in fact when we had a group of children up here, they were surprised that it actually came out of a plant

02:00 because as far as they knew it came out of a bag with a load of other sweets and things like that

02:04 They didn't realise where the licorice came from

02:06 When we've actually grown the vegetables here, what we do with the fruit is we actually give it to

02:12 the food bank up at Seacraft, the Leeds 14 Trust

02:16 There is obviously a cost of living crisis and just to be able to help people in a small way

02:22 is a sense of achievement

02:25 With everything going through the roof, I think Britain should actually start turning around

02:31 and going back, if you like, going back to the old 40s style and Dig for Britain

02:35 Give the food away to people, why not?

02:39 [Music]

02:42 We'd love more volunteers, we are struggling with lack of volunteers

02:54 They don't all need to dig, it is a pleasant place to be

02:59 It's a calming environment, we all know when you're in nature it helps your mental health

03:06 It helps you physically and mentally I think

03:08 This is it, this is Seacraft, we get a bad rap, Seacraft always gets a bad rap

03:15 There's a lot of good things going on in Seacraft

03:17 and that's what this garden makes me feel

03:19 When I walk through that door, or through them gates, I think, yeah we're doing something

03:23 We're doing something different

03:25 [Music]

03:28 [Music fades]

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