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Managing Our Sites.
Abington Lodge Wilsons' Orchard Hunthe Garden Secret Garden Long Park
In all our practical work managing sites, we involve local people and we work for wildlife diversity. Sometimes these two aims work together and sometimes they are rather conflicting. And when the site has the third aim of being for food producing as well, that pulls the site-management in a third direction. Getting it right is important to us. How do we do it?
Here's some examples :-
At Abington Lodge Green , not counting visits by Kite, Crane and Hobby, over 400 plants and animals have been noted. (We keep records of all the identifiable species we find on our sites.) What do the species find there in order to 'make a living'? If we can answer that question, we can maybe manage the site better for their needs. One simple answer: Pond creatures need ponds. And the local community, in this case the Housing Association's elderly residents, need a beautiful landscape to walk out into. Happily, ponds and wetlands contribute to that calm beauty as well as to the needs of damselflies and whirligig beetles.
At Wilsons' Orchard all three aims - wildlife, food and community - can pull us in different directions. The aged trees are an example. We want apples and other fruit so we prune the trees. We want wildlife diversity so we leave dead wood in the trees for the invertebrates and the woodpeckers that feed on them. We want visitors from the local community to enjoy the orchard and its wildlife safely so we remove unsafe branches if they are close by the paths our visitors use.
Hunthe Garden in Northampton is very aptly named. It lies behind blocks of garages that are themselves hidden between the backs of Lutterworth and Barry Road's houses.
Hunthe Garden , one of SCE's seven sites, is also known as the recycled permaculture garden. Everything used in the garden has been discarded as rubbish. For instance an unwanted chest freezer has been recycled as a mid-garden watering facility From our belief in recycling and reducing environmental impact, most recycled materials we use there are sourced from nearby residents.
Another strength of the garden is that it is managed by permaculture and organic principles so if you want so see permaculture in action visit or come along and join in at Hunthe Garden on Thursdays between 10am and 4pm.
In our Secret Garden when we found Small Nettle and Small Balsam we sought to conserve them there, even though so far as we know they offer little benefit to food productivity. These less-known plants need their own space in the urban landscape. Where else in the immediate urban landscape might our visitors enjoy seeing them?
At Long Park visitors enjoy not only the wildlife. The Park has a significant history and its vestiges are visible. We encourage groups to visit, to enjoy and to see. At all sites we like to tell what we do and to show what is there. Sometimes, for instance, we lead groups into identifying the snail and ant species, the bumblebees, the pond-life or the ladybirds on our sites. Often they get to eat our organic produce there as well as part of the event.
Wildlife Conservation & Ecology.
SCE works on the conservation on half a dozen sites around Northampton. But it also does more than that. Our skills have been taken to other places in the town, others beyond in the county, and in other counties too. Some examples:
- Wildlife surveys
- Hedge-laying (and training in this)
- Tree-work (for instance saving and reshaping a fallen apple tree)
- Making a fedge (fence+hedge)
- Training groups in apple trees pruning.
- Running Grafting Courses.
- Making willow sculptures. example ...
- Creating a wildlife garden
- Meadow mowing
- Scrub-control work
- Hedge planting
- Pond making and management
Publications and more.
To take one of these examples further.
Willow sculpture is somewhere between art and craft. Is it ecology or conservation as well? It can and should be. We like to think before we act, … as balancing the needs of various management outcomes are important to SCE.
So before creating the sculptures, we consider :
- Where the willow came from and the ecological effects of removing it from there.
- Is the willow to be used locally obtained or are we guilty of 'un thoughtfully moving genetics around the countryside'.
- What species of willow is used - there are many tens of species in Britain - and not just because some are easier to sculpt with.
- The effects of planting the willow and installing the sculptures on the habitats and species already present.
And, a separate matter: What are future financial and management implications of carrying out this work
Someone defined ecology as 'the study of why what's where'.
We recognise that all conservation work needs to be based in ecology thinking. One size does not fit all. Different solutions are needed in different places. The management of each pond and each hedge may have to be different from each other pond or hedge.
Our attention to these complexities have lead us into the publication of a series of booklets on various aspects of British conservation and wildlife. See our Publications page
SCE believes 'environment' includes 'species' and that 'species' includes 'humans'. So excluding humans would be silly. We affect the environment as much as - more than? - any other species. We are a large, a numerous, a thinking and a widespread species. Many reasons to involve the human community in the aims and actions of a wildlife organisation such as ours. If the human species isn't involved in the environment then pigs can definitely fly.
And we are also our species. (And, by the way, mostly live in towns. We support urban wildlife initiatives.)
SCE has a widespread and supportive Membership . We actively involve the local community in all that we seek to do. Examples:
Our Secret Garden and Wilsons' Orchard are developed with the help of volunteers living locally and who are the backbone of community grouped around food production. The organic food we produce feeds into (pun!) our community events and, more widely than that, into the partnership of a dozen or so groups which is Northampton's Healthy Living Centre.Wilsons' Orchard has its own group as well, "The Apple Cause". It is run by its members, with SCE assistance. And now it is pushing off a research project into other orchards in this area.
At Abington Lodge Green a great proportion of the local community lives on site, a sheltered housing scheme of a Housing Association. In The Barn, a wonderful building on site now redeveloped from agriculture to meeting rooms, we hold may of our community events which include talks, games evenings, folk-singing, our AGM, children events and feasts like 'Nettle Nosh'. Abington Community and Wildlife Group helps us - and we support them in doing so - in the running of events based around Abington Lodge Green.
The human species varies like any other: old, young, able or not, and so on. Community involvement means all the community as far as SCE is concerned. We generally make little of it - Why should we? - but among our volunteers we have a number of elderly and/or disadvantaged folk, some for instance from the St Andrews Hospital in Northampton . And of our seven co-directors, drawn from membership at our AGM each year, two at present are long-term disabled. We have not yet managed total access to all our sites for all-comers. But we're working on it.
"You are what you eat" [*] -
Pesticide residues …. gender-altering this .… genetically modified that ….
[ * whether you are a human or a herring, a dragonfly or a dormouse]
"a peck o' dirt before you die".... and....
"You can't food all of the people all of the time" [*]
[ * not everyone is enthralled with / in thrall to food-as-business]
SCE seeks to support those who think..
that food being Local may be better for them.
and food being Organic may be better for them
We do not have certified organic status on our food producing sites but we do work in community-based organic ways. And we go further in that we produce organically as one aim and we diversify wildlife as a co-equal aim . Wildlife is not just 'something we do to get a subsidy'
SCE's directors include one Permaculturist and one who is a Smallholder specialising in organic Goat's Milk Cheese.
SCE is involved with community allotment initiatives.
And SCE folk like scrumping and grazing: Wouldn't it be nice if 'amenity planting' were re-defined as fruit-trees, herbs and vegetables?
See our Projects page for further information.
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