Our regular classes introduced a variety of crafts including pottery, leatherwork, willow weaving, knitting and crochet. Our gardening classes covered everything from seed sewing and bulb planting to making a propagator, a hanging basket and filling the planters in our community based project. Cookery sessions for adults, children and families together introduced a whole range of techniques and celebrated the queen's jubilee and other notable dates such as valentines day and halloween.
The wellbeing of everyone in our community is a main consideration in the organisation of all our events and to this end we have successfully run several community programmes alongside individual classes. The biggest project was to install 110 lamp column planters across the Marshland villages. Having worked hard to ready them for erection on the columns timing was typical - they were erected just as the heatwave hit! Immediately we had an urgent problem to solve - keeping them all watered. Thanks to the many volunteers stepping up to the task for which we are very grateful we managed a good display which over the summer months was appreciated by many. In addition we supplied 120 planters together with compost and plants to local residents for roadside display, complementing the lamp column planters and all blooming in jubilee colours of silver and purple. Across the community we have planted hundreds of daffodil, snowdrop, crocus and bluebell bulbs which will hopefully produce a blast of colour as we head out of winter.
We again had numerous litter picking sessions which we plan to restart early in 2023. They are a chance to not only keep 'our patch' looking at its best, but an opportunity to have a natter and forge new friendships, please come along.
So what's planned for 2023? Not a lot yet! We have again secured substantial funding to continue our work and therefore cookery, gardening and craftwork will continue with both practical classes and demonstrations for children, adults and families. The lamp column planters will again be erected and hopefully will be a riot of colour in 2023. The plants and compost are already ordered but we need your help to plant them up (a few dates will be in our annual calendar) and indeed to keep them all watered again. We will be recycling the wooden planters too with new plants, so do come along with your planter box and replant it (dates to follow).
IEM is well aware of the challenges facing many of us at the moment and have partnered with Groundwork Yorkshire and the Moorlands charity in Old Goole we will be offering two free community information sessions to be delivered by the Green Doctors on Wednesday 8th February.
In addition we have funding to give away 25 slow cookers to those who would welcome them - these will be available from the Moorlands Centre from February 2023.
IEM is a gross-roots community lead project, without your input and support it wouldn't happen. Equally if you have any ideas about things you would like to try, let us know
- anything is possible (more or less)!
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