Today, sustainable life course leader Stephanie Adelaar took a trip down to her old haunt Walmley to help plant trees. Working with Kingstanding Food Community, Forest Schools Birmingham and Trees for Cities we helped to plant up over 50 meters with two lines of small trees packed together to form a mixed wood bush including hawthorns and sloes.
We got quite a lot done despite some set backs (lack of a coffee shop, rain etc). For more information check out their website.
Sustainable Life attended the Thimblemill Library event and managed a stall showcasing our courses and produce. We felt it was really sucessful with many people complimenting our preserves and goat’s cheese! We also had lots of people interested in our future courses (yay!). Then later on we took a selection of people outside to thimblemill brook for a short foraging walk where we found:
Sustainable Life have been invited by Grandma’s Apple Crumble (A heritage project) to have a stall at the gathering at Thimblemill Library in Bearwood on Sunday 15th November 2015. Here we will be available to answer questions, sign up to hear about our courses or just drop by and pick up an information pack. Our course leader Alan Bale will be attending the event to do a foraging walk at Thimblemill Brook and a brief talk.
Grandma’s Apple Crumble is self described as: project centring on food scarcity during World War One and how that relates to our current situation in the area. It’s about connecting people through a shared experience of what life is like for us today against the backdrop of what it was like back then. The project involves planting fruit trees by the Thimblemill Brook with Uplands School and a Gathering at Thimblemill Library on the 15 Nov 2015 to which the wider community is invited.
More information and pictures of this event will be forthcoming!
Sustainable Life had a small corner at the Highbury Harvest Festival this year where we demonstrated how to make nettle rope. You can view the gallery for this event here.
We had lots of fun at the festival this year and spent most of our time making short lengths of Nettle rope which turned into wonderful little bracelets! We tested the rope (with a few failures but mostly sucesses) to see how strong it is and used some of it to help tie the photograph boards down.
We had a lovely array of photographs from our last nettle workshop at Sarehole Mill (taken by Dean Gammon Photographer), and a basket of information bundles all about nettles, our next two workshops and a special offer!
We didn’t just make nettle rope either, we also threw together the start of a woven basket using nettles in the style of a willow basket weave (on display with a bramble basket). We had nettle tea on the boil for most of the afternoon with a selection of extras including cammomile and lemonbalm.
We were also very pleased to get a positive response to our Nettle and Neem oil moisturising bars and gave a few away!
Thank you to everyone who came over and had a look at our section and thank you to everyone who signed up interest to our courses for 2016! We hope to have many more dates planned for the next year very soon so stay tuned!
