What Will The Harvest Be? Weekend Events

The Friends of Abbey Gardens & Somewhere invite you to two weekend events as part of

WHAT WILL THE HARVEST BE?

On Saturday the 8th of November we will be leading a 'layout day' at the Abbey Gardens site. Working with string, tapes and spray paint we will be literally marking out the design for next years Harvest Garden onto the grass at Baker's Row.

It should be a fun afternoon outdoors with lots of potential for measuring and string mistakes! Liberal tea brakes will be programmed into the schedule.

We will be meeting at Abbey Gardens at 12.30 for the all-afternoon project, please wear suitable clothing and footwear, and do bring along any coloured string you have to help us mark out the beds. Children are welcome but must be supervised.

Following on from this we will also be meeting on Saturday the 15th of November to build some compost bins and a test raised bed on the site ... again all welcome. Meet at the gardens from 12.30 onwards.

Please let us know if you are planning to attend

Posted Friday 7th November, 2008 at 1:39 pm by Nina

East Tilbury Interview

I enjoyed one of my regular visits back to East Tilbury this week, catching up with Bata-ville friends at the Bata Resource and Reminiscence Centre. These are always busy events and this Wednesday they had 300 visitors! One of these was Michael Casey who has bravely set out to start a new kind of news site for the area focussed on local views. It's called YourThurrock and links to all of the clips he makes on YouTube ... you can see the quick interview he did with me about the film here.

I've also added some new images to our Bata group on Flickr, it's now got some good shots from Bata communities all over the world.

Posted Friday 24th October, 2008 at 11:10 am by Nina

"One scene shot inside a freezer"

Last week was a hectic but very satisfying one, bringing my Exmoor National Dress project to fruition. I was taking a series of portraits of local people and making a short film about the process. There was a lot of zooming across moors down into valleys, in glorious sunshine. Just the ticket after a wet summer.
Here's myself (uncharacteristically holding the boom) with my crew, Alex Richardson (on camera) and Sacha Atkinson (Sound). The picture was taken by Steph Thomas, our great production assistant for the shoot, who used the time between locations to work on a very thorough risk assessment which ranged from 'attack by animals' to 'one scene shot inside a freezer'.

Posted Thursday 16th October, 2008 at 3:41 pm by Karen

JONAGORED & AGM

This Saturday is the AGM for the Friends of Abbey Gardens and if you're interested in getting involved with our project there do come along ...

The details are on FOAG website here.

Meanwhile the Abbey Gardens Apples have been identified:

Dear Ms Pope

Brogdale Collections

Posted Monday 13th October, 2008 at 10:46 am by Nina

A stitch in time

Here's me fiddling about with a prototype of the Exmoor National Dress.
Can't find anywhere to integrate the fantastic horse-motif Western shirt hanging on the wall, sadly.

Posted Thursday 2nd October, 2008 at 5:15 pm by Karen

Wild Flower Harvest

We had a very successful wildflower seed harvest on Saturday for What Will The Harvest Be? We gathered so many that we weren't able to process them all on the day, although we did make a start. They include: White Campion, Corn Cockle, Cornflower, Corn Chamomile, Corn Marigold, Field Poppy and Scentless Mayweed ... although I must confess we had a job to tell the Mayweed from the Chamomile.

The photos are up on Flickr here

Posted Wednesday 1st October, 2008 at 4:34 pm by Nina

URBAN SEED DAY II

Come & join us on Saturday September 27th for our second URBAN SEED DAY

We will be gathering the seeds from the wild flowers grown at Abbey Gardens this year - some we'll be keeping for next years Harvest Garden but some we'll be giving away. So, if you fancy a bed of wildflowers in your own garden or you've spotted a unloved patch in your local environment that could do with cheering up, this is the event for you.

I will be at the garden, with some of the Friends of Abbey Gardens group on Saturday morning from 10.00 -12.00. As well as collecting seeds we'll obviously be happy to tell you more about What Will The Harvest Be? and how our plans for the garden are shaping up.

We also have a few packets of seeds left (from the wonderful Chiltern Seeds) to give away to anyone who wants to get planting now for next season in the Harvest Garden. If you take some away on Saturday you can bring them on in your own garden (or just on a windowsill) ready for next spring.

If you have seeds gathered from your own gardens/plots do bring some along to swap.

You might like to make an East-London afternoon of it, bring a flask or picnic and join us for the Hackney Wick Festival afterwards, it's an interesting walk from Abbey Gardens to 'the Wick' and makes for a full East End double day out.

Posted Wednesday 24th September, 2008 at 2:51 pm by Nina

Heard it on the Grapevine

Anyone who travels through Stratford station (East London) may have already seen the feature about Abbey Gardens in the 'Stratford Grapevine' last week ... if you missed it you can read about it here. The newspaper is a project by artist Lucy Harrison who's become a 'friend of' our Abbey Gardens project through our shared research into the area. The sort of spider drawing on the front shows how all the people who have contributed to the paper are linked together, and is a nice map of the connections made. Each time the paper comes out I find it really cheering to see people on the (super depressing!) North London Line reading about their local area rather than the Metro's version of London news.

Posted Tuesday 23rd September, 2008 at 1:20 pm by Nina

King of Exmoor

I was delighted to drop in to Tom Lock's workshop in Hawkridge, after talking to a nice gang of Somerset artists at the 'Reveal' event recently.
I had asked Tom to consider making a 'head-dress' for the Exmoor National Dress a while back, but as his lifetime retrospective (at Hawkridge Show, see pic) was absorbing all his time he declined....But I know real no from a 'well....no' and I had a feeling he was going to come up with something good.
Here Tom is modelling the prototype - it will eventually have little antlers in declining size all the way round. The head-dress 'ring' is made of 4 or 5 curved antler pieces carefully glued and sanded, it's quite a feat to find suitably curved pieces let alone to fix them together. What I especially like is the front-most horn, which Tom describes as "freaky" - its a tiny straight horn emerging from a misshapen, bony nugget. He'd had it for years, finding it useless for most of his work, but now has a good use for the freaky!
I tried it on and can confirm that it's actually comfy too....

Posted Monday 22nd September, 2008 at 11:47 am by Karen

Boswell's B&B

A couple of weeks ago I revisited Coll, a Scottish Island Karen and I breezed through in our 1996 Boswell & Johnson trail blog-a-thon A Hypertext Journal. On our first trip we only had a few hours to explore around the tiny village where the ferry arrives, but this time I spent 5 long rainy days on the Island looking into family history matters (more here for the curious) and mainly browsing drenched flora and fauna (pictures here for wildflower nerds!). Anyway never one to give up on resolving a project I did cycle down to the Southern end of the Island to see Breachacha Castle apparently one of the spots that the great pair stayed during the 10 days they were stuck on Coll due to inclement weather ... I might even have to get my well thumbed 'Journey to the Western Isles' out for a re-read of the relevant section.

Posted Thursday 18th September, 2008 at 3:12 pm by Nina