Grow Fife Community Garden

Dean Nelson was our guest speaker and he explained the work of the Grow West Fife charity which is based in the Walled Garden at the Scottish Miners Convalescent Trust’s Blair Castle just outside Culross. Grow West Fife grows vegetables for food banks and community pantries. They run a repair cafe and have a community workshop where people can learn DIY skills.

Free weekly community lunches are aimed at people on low incomes, anyone who is socially isolated, people with mental wellbeing issues. More recently they have set up the Young Club, which is working with Fife Council with the 20 families most dependent on food banks in the West Fife villages to teach them to cook cheap, delicious, nutritious meals. 

Dean told the story about how Grow West Fife came about and claimed it was one of those stories that come about in life when you're planning something completely different. In 2019 Dean and his wife moved to a cottage in Culross, he told us:-

“We were trying to get to know the area, and walking around the hedgerows, and we came across a gate to Walled Garden and looked inside.  It was really beautiful, but really completely abandoned. It was overgrown, it was this jungle of thistles and nettles, and basically overgrown. It had one greenhouse that had hardly any glass in it, half of which had been blown down and the rest of it was a mangle of aluminium and glass. It had a completely derelict Edwardian greenhouse with an old boiler with trees growing out of the wood frame of the greenhouse.”

They completely forgot about it but about ten weeks later, lockdown happened. Suddenly there were all these stories about people being furloughed, people losing their jobs, businesses closing down. Dean and his wife were having a conversation about whether or not there was anything they could do when they remembered the abandoned garden and thought maybe they could grow food for anyone who needs it.

Having contacted the garden’s owners the Scottish Mining Convalescent Trust to ask them if they could take it for the summer, expecting them to say no.  Instead the trust bit their hand off and just said yes. A post on the village Facebook group asking for volunteers raised around 15 volunteers and off they went into what was an incredible growing summer.

Covid restrictions allowed everyone to be out for no more than an hour a day, but there was an exemption to be out all day if you were growing food for other people. Those furloughed came along and Rabby Brewster, the local farmer, donated a thousand seed potatoes. Another smallholder lent them a rotavator and within a long weekend, they had turned these two overgrown fields into about ten 25 metre beds.

Throughout that summer, weekly deliveries were made to three local food banks or community pantries. High Valleyfield, Oakley and Kincardine. Suddenly they had an activity that was developing with more and more volunteers coming.  With funding from the Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund they built a shed with a kitchen in it that allowed them to start community lunches.  These often attract people who haven't left the house in a couple of years and the project addressed loneliness and isolation

Grow West Fife has now got a kitchen team, they have more garden volunteers, a team of about six to eight kitchen volunteers who bake and cook, and a food coordinator who gives cooking lessons.

Above: Dean Nelson at RCWF flanked by Neil Spriddle and President Mark Todd

Funding followed from the Crown Estate for coastal communities to hire an environmental coordinator. She hosts workshops, bringing in different speakers, teaching people how to live more sustainably, whether it was growing your own food, composting, making your own household cleaning materials, dyeing and developing your own fabrics.

Funding from Volunteer Support Fund helped different groups overcome barriers to volunteering.  Grow West Fife started working with a range of groups. Fairway Fife, works with young adults with learning disabilities, mainly autism visit twice a week to the garden. Andy's Man Club, which is for men in crisis, and a group called Change Mental Health for people with more serious mental health issues, who attend along with their carers.

Although a property developer wants to buy the garden and Blair Castle, the group have a 21-year lease.  This year is going to be probably their most interesting year yet. It's the first time that they have had a full-time gardener and a three-day-a-week food coordinator. “In everything that we're doing, we're trying to make sure that we reach the people who need it most” added Dean.

Consultants are now looking at a new business plan. With 80-plus volunteers, a Facebook group that has 2,500 supporters, they have lots to sustain it, but the next stage is for the management of it to be professionalised, so Grow West Fife can have a sustainable future.  Dean summed it up as bringing people together and making them very welcome, "it is a country club for the skint and the lonely."

In giving the club’s formal vote of thanks Neil Spriddle thanked Dean and praised the transformation of a derelict site into something that is working so well for many sections of the community.