Would you like to be involved in the Sandgate Community Garden? New volunteers are always welcome, and the crops grown are shared by and with the community of gardeners. This is a volunteer project in the Enbrook Park grounds of Saga.
The Community Garden team are also involved in other projects around Sandgate and Folkestone, including “Incredible Edible” planters by the Golden Valley shops, in Fremantle Road Park, along the High Street and Esplanade.
You can follow all the seasons and keep updated with what is happening. Get involved in the community and learn new skills. There is now a new wildlife pond and are pleased to have 2 bee hives on site. Gardening sessions are run twice a week. Get in touch to find out more.
Follow the progress on Instagram and like or get in touch on Facebook.
Updates written by Leonie Wootton.
Sandgate Community Garden: Update 21 August 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 21st August: final reminder of our appearance at the Sandgate Sea Festival next Sunday 28th August on the seafront! What a difference a week has made! We got a little bit of rain at the very start of the week which was enough to freshen the garden but certainly not enough to make an impression when suddenly on Wednesday we were treated to a torrential downpour which, looking at the weather app was ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 14 August 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 14th August: Great weather for growing figs, and amaranth amongst the asparagus. The decision to start planting again last week was a good one at the time but we had to work pretty hard to keep the seedlings alive, watering every other day for the week until they started to get a few roots into the ground and stand upright for more time than they flopped over. However, with the return of the ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 8 August 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 8th August: sometimes, you just can’t hold back any more. Crikey! It is August already! We are into the summer holiday period with some of our volunteers going away, and new volunteers turning up whilst they are holidaying in Sandgate. We are getting reports of how much greener parts of the country are looking compared with scorched earth Sandgate, and accounts of rain falling when there is none here. On the last day ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 24 July 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 24th July: the absence of water. So it is that the drought continues here in sunny Sandgate with perhaps a millimetre or two of rain just to tantalise, whilst the north and west of the country are treated to torrential downpours. The grass is more yellow, and any growth is stunted and slow. Having finished the carrots and had a good go at the beetroot, the badgers have turned their attention to the ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 17 July 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 17th July: Badgers, weeding, water and guerilla gardening. Oh dear! It is grumbling all round in the gardening communities, where the water butts have dried up and now resorting to having to use the washing up water and bath water or shower water! Luckily the plants do not mind soft soap; in fact we have started to use a spray of soapy water on some of the dwarf beans that have been affected ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 10 July 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 10th July: Insufficient water, ants, bees and the incredible Cardoon. It certainly has been a warm month and how very glad we are to receive a bowser full of water every week or we would surely be in trouble trying to keep the new plantings alive. The trouble is, the courgettes are trying to swell as are the tomatoes and the beans, but with no rain such crops would suffer if we did ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 3 July 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 3rd July: 100% real unadulterated local honey. Where is the summer going? Time seems to be passing at a rapid pace and we are working on planting and preparing for the autumn, winter and next spring harvests. The kale has been planted, the spring purple sprouting and Romanesco pricked out and the winter purple sprouting in the pipeline to be sown. The mange tout has finished, the frame removed and the bed prepared ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 26 June 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 26th June: The skills of managing tomatoes. It has been a challenge this week to keep up with the tomatoes and the growth they are putting on. Every week our list of jobs includes checking all the tomato plants for side shoots, and every week those side shoots sneak up on us and start taking over. Keeping tomato plants as a cordon or single stemmed plant is quite a skill, you really do ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 19 June 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 19th June: Completing the Enbrook Valley planters, and Don’t Step on a Bee. A busy week where the temperatures rose, the sun shone and we had to start watering again. The two planters outside the Golden Arrow in the Golden Valley have been under review for some time but we now think that a plan of action has been finalised and can at last be implemented. The pub landlords had been thinking long ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 12 June 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 12th June: Potatoes, Brockhill School, Stream Walk Community Garden and the Golden Arrow. It seems the temperatures are beginning to rise, and the cucumbers are not looking quite so sickly, even the dwarf beans have started to perk up a bit and the courgettes are just starting to show the first fruits. We seem to have managed to keep up with the removal of the side shoots on the tomatoes this year, and ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 5 June 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 5th June: Planty Jubes. Happy Jubilee weekend! We hope you are enjoying the celebrations this weekend, and that the weather is not spoiling things going on wherever you are. In the garden we have been rejoicing over the appearance of some decent rain, which lightens the load as regards watering, and saves us much time, however now some of the more tender plants, especially the cucumbers are complaining about too much water and ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 29 May 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 29th May: When life gives you lemon trees, and a world of guerrilla gardening. It was a week of cancellations due to the fact we had even more rain, bringing the total so far for this month to a whopping 47.2 mm! Anyone who has not seen the garden for a couple of weeks is amazed by the lush green growth and how quickly everything has shot up and matured. Very little watering ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 22 May 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 22nd May: Calling All Supermarkets – please, water your plants. Thank goodness at last for a substantial downpour. There was enough to start to refill the much reduced level of the pond, and to bring on the broad beans so that the pods are starting to develop. Apparently we had 23mm in the last few days, which is more than we sometimes get in an entire month. The bulb onions are swelling and ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 15 May 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 15th May: I’m sorry, I’ll read that again, Honey and the Moon. Oh dear, oh dear! It seems I made a very optimistic reading last week of the rainfall, and mistook the temperature of 17.8 as being the actual amount, when it was in fact just 4mm. A little bit of overenthusiastic statistic reading to say the least. How fortuitous it would have been to have rained 17.8 mm. It is still extremely ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 8 May 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 8th May: Moths and moles, golden oregano and the need for more space! Yippee! We have had a drop or two of rain this week, some 17.8 mm apparently, which has freshened up the gardens beautifully – still not enough of course, but it has helped. The tomatoes have now all been planted in two beds with a few along the wall. By the end of the week the courgettes and summer squashes ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 1 May 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 1st May: Tomato down, fence up, bench built, but the rain is AWOL. There is still no rain for Sandgate and very little promise of any on the horizon. Apparently we had 21.1 mm of rain this month which must have come on the very first day or so, or crept in during one night! The plants have to really put down their roots to find any moisture in the soil and clearing ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 24 April 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 24th April: Whatever happened to April showers? There does not seem to have been any rain on the horizon for several weeks now, and any hint of rain on the weather forecast seems to pass over and come to nothing. The ritual is on arrival at Enbrook garden, to poke a finger into the soil to determine if there is any moisture there, and if we have to water. The new plantings have ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 17 April 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 17th April: As the weather improves, the planting gets going in earnest. Cucumbers, tomatoes, courgettes, summer squashes and more. The weather has remained considerably warmer, even at night, which has meant that the tomato plants can at last go outside into the cold frames where they will enjoy basking in the sunshine and really begin to put on some growth. Some of them need repotting once again as they have started to climb ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 10 April 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 10th April: Our helpers are unstoppable by weather, lorries and fuel shortages. The changing weather continued to bring challenges this week. We had to cancel a working party from the Napier Barracks as the weather was just simply too wet and cold. The following day we were being joined by a working party from Saga. Saga are keen for their work force to volunteer to support and work with local groups, so we ...
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Sandgate Community Garden: Update 3 April 2022
Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 3rd April: Blasted by hail and snow, but still growing strong There is never a dull moment when it comes to the subject of the weather in the UK. We seem to have gone from having to slap on the suntan cream for fear of being burnt in the sunshine, working in T shirts, to having to get the full torrential storm gear on to get blasted by hail stones and snow. The ...
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