A great turn out today to complete Stage Two of our Car Park project. As you may remember we are working in partnership with Swan Shopping Centre to spruce up their planters in their car park in time for the Olympic Cycle race. We had 135 geraniums in red, white and purple to plant as well as 52 box hedging plants and 26 euonymous plants. Fifty-two periwinkles are to turn up later on to complete the planting for this summer. We just need to do a little bit of watering to keep them going! It was a nice mix of people coming together to achieve the same goal. To see it go from nothing to something has been amazing, and all down to the hard work and dedication from our trusted volunteers and the local community. Thank you to all!

Therfield school hosted an Olympic Fete involving the Leatherhead and Ashtead Confederation of schools. Ten schools in total came together to provide entertainment, food and stalls for families to come and enjoy. We were allowed to have a stall and sold our flower pots and hanging baskets with the help of Jen and her megaphone! A big hit on our stall was the raffle to win three hours of gardening time at your home. The winner was very happy and we will keep you updated what we get up to in her garden! Altogether we raised £300 for some much needed childrens' equipment and gardening gloves. Thanks to the volunteers who made the stall a complete success :)

A huge thank you also goes out to all the organisers at Therfield school for making it such a wonderful day. The sports to try out kept us and the kids busy between our shifts on our stall and the food was a big hit. The weather was clearly on your side!!!

We think we planted over 300 seeds today including parsnip, swede, beetroot, radish, chard, courgettes, carrots, melons and tomatoes. We even started growing our pumpkins for halloween!

Our main achievement today was the addition of guttering on the back of the polytunnel. When it rains on the tunnel we will now be collecting loads of water for all the plants inside the polytunnel.

Join us next week as we finish off our to do list and create another Pallet Garden, start our sunflower growing competition and decorate our plant pots for sale!

After picking out the radishes from the polytunnel and planting out onions and garlic, we set to work planting up more than 30 pots and hanging baskets to sell later on this month. We will be having a stall at Therfield's Olympic Celebration on Saturday 26th May 2012. Here we will be selling our hard work to save up for some bits we need at the Garden.
We also managed to rescue some of the mown grass from the orchard to use as mulch in the fruit cage, tried out a new netting polytunnel to protect the cauliflowers and picked out all the blossom on the fruit trees.

We have had a great write up in the local paper today!
Check it out here:  http://www.thisissurreytoday.co.uk/Volunteers-spruce-cycle-route/story-15988874-detail/story.html