A Greener and Safer Craigheads

Craigheads Community Garden is a partnership between the people of Craigheads, Barrhead Boys Brigade, Carts Greenspace, and local people across Barrhead. The project is replacing a previously unused section of public green space with a garden designed by and for our community. It is being implemented in a number of phases. The first phase has been to restore the bit of landscaping on Craighead Way which contained a tree, a hedge and some flowerbeds. This will be followed on by a wildlife garden at the stone wall next to the church and a pathway along the grass leading to the car park on Stormyland Way. The garden will include a mural and some benches.

East Renfrewshire Council Community Safety Unit has generously funded the costs of the community garden. We are grateful to them for supporting our community.

Why a garden?

We seek to use this project to foster relationships between different neighbourhoods in Barrhead and amongst different age groups from the young to the elderly. For the project to achieve its aim of creating a greener and safer Craigheads, we need people to support the project by helping others to attend and for you to make your opinions known, so the project can accurately reflect the views and ambitions of all tenants and residents. We also need people to help us in securing funding to complete and expand these projects so if you want to help contact us.

The Community Garden project isn’t a stand alone project. It is reinforced by the vandalism budget, which helps empower young people to deter vandalism and gain a sense of ownership of the community and our eventual garden. Simply put, the budget gives young people £100 to organise a trip to do BMX Riding in May 2008, but crucially, for every incident of vandalism to the community garden or indeed any other areas of Craigheads, money is deducted from the budget. Therefore by helping young people to appreciate that there is a cost to vandalism, it also lets them fully apppreciate the consequencies of their actions. Indeed, it will empower them to be more proactively involved in the regeneration of Craigheads. For the vandalism budget to work effectively, we need your support. All you need to do is let us know of any incidents of vandalism. Once we know about an incident, we will put it to the young people, and the logical consequence of this will follow i.e. a reduction in their budget. Involving young people in the regeneration of Craigheads and entrusting them with the responsibility for keeping Craigheads safe and clean is important; after all, while they may not pay the rent or council tax, they probably spend much more of their time in Craigheads than their parents do and so need to appreciate how important their involvement is. We also invite young people to submit ideas and suggestions for improving the website and we would also welcome contributions from those of all ages and from all areas of the community.

In addition to the community garden and vandalism budget Craigheads has a number of other smaller projects such as the bulb planting and clean-up campaign. In the next year we intend to press the council for use of skips to help us organise regular clean-up campaigns to reinforce the work we have already done, and to also link into our other community events like the sports day and car boot sale. We want our community events and regeneration projects to flow naturally into each other and generate momentum and strength from coordination.

Once the community garden has been completed we intend to have a small ceremony and community day to highlight the efforts of the people involved in the projects and to hand out awards such as the Craigheads Young Gardeners award to the young pepole most heavily involved in the planting of the community garden and other activities. We invite ideas and suggestions on how we could best reward those taking part - phone 0141 881 9065 or email Paul McDonagh.

Bulb Planting

On Saturday 27 October we planted daffodil bulbs as part of National Make a Difference Day. Some were planted at the side of the stone wall behind Arthurlie Church, and these will form a meadow and be part of a wildlife garden. Bulbs were also planted around the two areas across from the stone wall and at the sloped area facing the masionettes of Stormyland Way. We also managed to plant bulbs at the bit of grass at Stomyland Way located just beside the tarmac bit of walkway that runs through the estate to the carpark at Sunnyside Place. These flowers bloomed around Easter time.