Hatcham Gardens Community Orchard
Planting an orchard in the local park on Kender Street New Cross Gate
The Friends of Hatcham Gardens have been lucky to be awarded a fully-funded community orchard project this year. We've been working with The Orchard Project to design our orchard, and on Saturday 8th February we are having a planting day from 9am - 2pm to plant our 7 new fruit trees. We will have supervision/guidance/training from The Orchard Project but we'll need to dig the holes, plant the trees and shovel the mulch ourselves. We're advertising for lots of volunteers to join from the local area, schools and youth clubs, but it would also be helpful to have some Good Gym volunteers to support us too!3 GoodGymers have supported Hatcham Gardens Community Orchard with 1 task.
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Upcoming sessions
Monday 10th March 2025 10:00am - 11:45am
Previous sessions
Could give a fig
Saturday 8th February
Written by Julian Osman
Good Gym are a hardy bunch. After various parkruns in the rain 3 of us made our way to Hatcham Gardens on the New Cross-Peckham border to help local volunteers with some tree planting. The Orchard Project is an amazing project that aims to help local groups plant and maintain community orchards in urban areas.
Despite the best efforts of the weather to suggest otherwise, we’re living in a warming world and alongside planting more common species, the selection of trees included species more common to warmer climes, including persimmon, apricot and fig.
Lewis from the project team gave us some very precise instructions and soon we were at work digging and breaking up harder earth with a worryingly named tool called The Persuader. Once the holes were dug mycofungus was added to help link the trees to the wood-wide web. Next up was staking, fencing and mulching and the orchard was ready to start providing an amazing resource for the local community.
