One of the The Seed SistAs 2024 Medicine Garden Grants went to Earth Tenders, a black-led community garden and archiving project based in South London. They offer low or no-cost workshops and training in food growing, medicine making, nature walks, crafts and well being practices for our communities.
Community Benefits from a Seed SistAs Grant
by Ali Yellop
So far our journey at the garden has been slow and steady. We’re exploring what a restful experience with this space of experimentation can look and feel like for us leading it. We’ve taken our time to build capacity and started weekly drop-in volunteering sessions from the beginning of May.
Cultivating and Preserving Our Plants
We applied for a Seed SisAs Garden Community Grant to support our core costs and cover essential equipment – which we have just been notified we’ve received – this enables us to move into a new phase with our medicine garden! We will be able to purchase a dehydrator which will allow us to remove an older, woody sage and a large rosemary bush, which has been decimated by rosemary beetles whilst saving parts of the plant to dry! We haven’t had the room or capacity to dry in a hanging basket. Through our Seed SistAs’ grant we have been blessed enough to cultivate old and new favourites, such as orange lemon balm, yarrow, feverfew, calendula, broad-leaf thyme, zaatar oregano, pineapple mint and purple African basil!
Our medicine garden is the first raised beds you see when you enter the space and has a bounty of herbs, such as lemon balm, spearmint, oregano and lavender, thriving in the space. Thinking ahead toward the autumn, we will focus on planting medicinal shrubs, such as hawthorn, as a natural living-fence and screening for privacy at the entrance to our space. We’d also love to integrate dogwood for future natural bead making, and plant in bulbs like the much loved wild garlic.
Building a Future for the Community
The funding we received from the Seed SistAs grant, alongside our new funding grant, will allow us to create wood signage and bring in external facilitators to lead sessions around woodwork, storytelling, and help us share new skills to our growing volunteer base.
Our small team has started to make changes to the design of the site, constructing the foundations of a patio to then assemble our new glasshouse on, and moving our tool shed to open up a larger area for future gatherings. We have support coming soon to help woodchip the space and hope to use a larger funding bid to create more seating from left over tree trunks and logs. Our journey to start our new composting system is almost beginning whilst we’ve learnt to tend the manure heaps already on site from the stable next door. We’ve refreshed our polytunnel’s soil, and begun growing cucamelon, cucumbers, tomatoes and chillies inside the tunnel. It has been a short period of time with a large amount happening. One one coco basket full as our elders say. We’ve done all this alongside growing lots of veg and herbs in the space whilst pressing on, despite less than ideal weather conditions this year. We’ve integrated growing with the moon cycles as a means of allowing our practice with the land to be cyclical and help rid ourselves of rigid colonial norms of time, and instead adapt to natural cycles which support our well being and relations with the space.
We have launched a monthly Growers Club for Black and People of Colour (BPOC) to learn practical growing skills, grow cultural foods, share grounding practices and storytelling, be playful and expand our hearts together. We’re encouraging BPOC of any level of growing experience and of any age to join us. The space so far has been a cross-cultural exchange; we all bring value to which we’ve had amazing feedback and interest in. The growth of the medicine garden will help us support our communities with future medicine making sessions!
With the launch of our Cultural Food Growing Project from July, we will also be exploring the many ways we can use food as medicine and infusing medicinal garden plants into our food. For example, our first session will coincide with our garlic harvest in the garden. We will be creating fermented garlic honey for example, and exploring the medicinal properties of the plant and honey, our cultural connections to the plant and having attendees contribute their reflections to a scroll. We’ll scan the scroll and keep it on our website as a resource to share the vast knowledge of our communities. We hope to keep this up across the project!
We’re slowly emerging and discovering what a sustainable future in space can look like and the impact we wish to have. So far, this is a site of exploration and it feels rich with potentials!
All images credits: Earth Tenders
Want to know more about our Community Medicine Garden Projects?
We are committed to developing projects to infiltrate all aspects of society to achieve a massive consciousness shift towards thinking more
holistically about health, wellbeing, community and culture. This is true eco activism.
Us Seed Sistas have dedicated our life’s work to being one of these self-sustaining communities. Our aim has always been to educate folx about harvesting and utilising plant medicine so that we are able to spread this revolutionary healing system globally.
We know only too well how much time effort, energy and capital it can take to get a community growing project off the ground and in the continued running, that is why we set up our very own Seed SistAs Grant. Donations and profits from sales of our books and remedies get directed into this pot. If your community garden project is interested in applying follow this link.
- Find a community garden near you to get involved in and planting herbs
- Learn more about about planting and cultivation of medicinal herbs
- Download our special Community Gardens Guide
- Apply for a grant
