Celebrate one whole year of The Orchard Garden with us, alongside our wonderful community who helped to create it.

Activities and further details to come - tea and cake guaranteed.

Save the Date!

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About The Orchard Garden‍

The Orchard Garden was built during the 2015 refurbishment of TOSH. For years the garden contained just four fruit trees, with spring bulbs and wildflowers growing up each Summer. The garden was plain and under-used, but had lots of potential.

With thanks to two years funding from the People’s Health Trust, with money raised through Health Lottery South West, in January 2023 we consulted with our community and commissioned a new garden design by a local Landscape Architect who works with communities.

Our garden theme is 'Food for Us, Food for Nature' and it is to be a sanctuary to work, rest, learn, grow and harvest in.

With the support of our volunteers, from our neighbourhood and our refugee community, we built the garden over 2023 to 2024. To ensure a low impact on nature we used recycled materials such as donated reclaimed bricks to build pathways and seating with minimal concrete.

Our community at The Old School House created terracotta tiles to decorate the seating circle, and the our Threads women's workshop sewed seat cushions and bunting for us. Local charity Faithworks and their workshop team created a beautiful seat arbour, and our second bench is made from recycled plastic. We planted 14 new fruit trees and climbers, wildflowers and bulbs, added espalier supports and arches and finished building and planting the garden in July 2024.

At our open day we were joined by over 100 people from our community to celebrate the hard work of our volunteers who together created our new orchard garden. Our community now use our garden daily for lunch and quiet time, chats and meeting breakouts or to work and think in the fresh air. Our neighbours come to run, play, forage and explore nature.‍

This project has been made possible with funding from the People’s Health Trust using money raised by Health Lottery South West. We have also received donations from JPMorgan, Wessex Water and more.

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Every Monday afternoon, 1.30pm-3pm, TOSH provides free Nature Crafts & Gardening workshops for our diverse community in Boscombe. If you or anyone you know would benefit from this welcoming and inclusive space, please contact our Garden Coordinator melinda@recreatedorset.co.uk, or pop in on a Monday afternoon to see what we are up to.

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