With the Summer Solstice just around the corner, it's a great time for us to share that our allotment has really come to life in the last few months! Flowers are blooming, seeds we planted are growing beautifully, and our group members are busy getting stuck into jobs such as weeding, planting and tidying the allotment site.

Here's a few highlights from the last few months:

Awarded a 'Wildlife Friendly Space' by The Wildlife Trust

We are thrilled to share that our allotment has been officially recognised as a 'wildlife-friendly space' through The Wildlife Trusts Gardening Award Scheme! Our 6-plot allotment is designed to support life in all its forms. Alongside providing therapeutic sessions for the people we support, we have created spaces where nature can thrive, such as bee and bug houses, bird feeding stations, nature ponds and planting chosen specifically to support pollinators. For many of the people we support with experience of homelessness, this space offers calm, purpose, and connection to the natural world. Receiving this recognition means a great deal to us.

Thanks, Good Gifts!

In May, we received some wonderful news. We received a generous £4,000 donation towards our allotment project! Thanks to the incredible generosity of Good Gifts, we can continue running our twice-weekly allotment sessions, offering a peaceful, therapeutic space for people with experience of homelessness to come together, grow and thrive. It makes such a difference. The Good Gifts 'Allotment for the Homeless' fund allows us to buy the essential supplies we need to keep these sessions going - from tools and seeds and everything in between. Thank you, Good Gifts!

Kind donations from supporters

We accepted a kind and generous donation from Stu, Steph and Ro at Horsely Hale Farm recently. Among the crockery, garden furniture and bits for Cambridge Cyrenians supported houses, we also had a donation of garden tools, pots and these beautiful wooden stools for our allotment! Our co-workers are now sanding down and repainting the stools, ready for our group to sit on when they're here at our peaceful allotment... and most likely enjoyed with a cuppa in hand! Thank you all at Horsely Hale Farm for thinking of us, and best of luck with what comes next for you.

We also had a visit from Cultivating Change, who were kind enough to gift us a large donation of seeds for our allotment. This helps us now to prepare our next crops and produce, and we can't wait to see their progress!

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Visitors on our trail cam

Our allotment gets plenty of visitors, and not all of them are human. Our trail cam caught a few of our wildlife guests in action over the past few weeks! Scroll through on our Instagram post and tell us: which one's your favourite?

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