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My local (ish) sure start centre is using their large raised beds to grow veg.

I seem to have been put in charge, as there are no other volunters . Does anyone have any ideas how I can get others involved? Plus get people to donate seed/plants/tools etc. An article has gone in the local paper, plus in the news letter for all the users.

I have donated, plants, seeds, and time. But I am not willing to do this on my own as I do not have the time or the ability to get to the centre often enough. I will not benefit from this, its for the children that go to the centre. The veg will be used for the children at snack time, plus it was meant to show how easy it is to grow your own.

I hope that I do not sound like I am being horrible, but I already run healthy frugal cookery courses there and I wish that more people would help out!!

Thanks Nikki

I'm not sure I can be very helpful, but I've got one or two ideas. I know how difficult it can be to get people motivated to help out if they don't see an obvious benefit to themselves.

I'm guessing some (or many?) of the adults will be doing parenting classes - I wonder if you could get the workers to incorporate a portion of that time to working in the garden? Of course it may mean convincing the staff too! That might be more of a long term strategy.

Do they ever have get togethers for talks etc? If you could get a few minutes, or even the whole thing, to talk directly to them - many people don't (and unfortunately a lot can't) even read the paper or newsletters - something along the lines of Andy's school talk would be good, take stuff along to try etc.

Can't think of anything else at the moment.

Dear Sunflowergal,

Just after reading your piece I heard a trail on Radio 4 for a series on community allotments and ideas about how to get them off the ground. Haven't investigated it yet but it seems the BBC website You and Yours might be of help ...

Love and Peace
Jim

You could request seeds etc on your local freecycle, depending on how strict your local freecycle rules are you could tell them about the project. Our local network are really easy going and you can tell people about local events, charity groups etc, another local network are really strict and ban you for doing this so jsut depends if you are lucky
- definitely ask for seeds and say what its for anyway thats within the rules and could spark interest, there' lots of commumity minded peolple who do freecycle