What a difference Wates make!

Today was a little mind-boggling. Wates is a national construction company, and the local branch chose Windmill Community Gardens to be one of their community day projects. This meant that over 30 folk descended on the site and started to fix things!

Councillor Mohammed Saghir cuts the ribbon to start the Wates Community Day

The team make a start on weeding in preparation for the fire pit area

Amazingly, one of the joiners managed to mend the very broken picnic table

Testing the new picnic table 

Making a start on the putting in the seats

We provided barbeques on site, so the Wates team could have a cooked lunch with burgers and sausages they'd brought, and we harvested some more potatoes to cook as well. Peter from the Mill Allotments let us have some salad to go with it, even turning up with a fantastic basket full of freshly picked strawberries, raspberries and cherries, which were much enjoyed.

Picking tatties for lunch

The ladies of the team prove it's not just the blokes who can carbonise sausages!

The team put the finishing touches to the kitchen

Thanks to the amazing efforts of the group, we now have a kitchen area with a non-leaking roof, windows on 3 sides, a sink and a work-surface with a shelf underneath. We also have a completed set of compost bins, a fire pit with seats around it and they have even mended the dodgy picnic bench! As well as all of that, the work party weeded all the paths, removed brambles from the orchard, and finished weeding and leveling the surface inside the polytunnel. Special thanks to Annette who tidied up and swept out the shed single handed.

The team with the wonderful new fire-pit circle

Windmill is now looking amazingly spick and span with so much work having been done and the beds nearly painted. We will be having a celebration day to officially open the project on Thursday July 21st at 12noon, so we hope anyone who is interested will come and have a look at what we've done.