Great good news!

Dear All
Now that Glencruitten Gazette Issue Three has been (or is being) distributed among the residents and tenants of the Glencruitten area in Oban (thank you, Kay, for a good editing and publishing job), I am absolutely chuffed to bits to pass on the following piece of good news:

We have been granted funding of £6,500 from the Fairer Argyll & Bute Partnership via the Fairer Oban Lorn and the Isles Working Group (part of Argyll & Bute Council). In the past few months, we have also received donations from MacQueen Brothers Ltd (£400) and the Oban Round Table (£100). We are so pleased to find that our garden project enjoys the support of the community and the council. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

It also means that we can now employ Community Links Scotland to design and oversee the next stages of garden development, including completing the design, sorting out drainage problems, landscaping, furnishing, etc. By next spring we will definitely have a very different-looking community garden. There will most likely be a quiet seating area at the top. The big trees will remain standing in the wedge along the burn, and your blogger very much hopes that the very productive vegetable and flower plot will continue to flourish along the fence to the drying greens of houses 8-12 Miller Road.

The big grant came in due to the initiative of a local resident (M.P.-J.) and two very hard-working ladies (M.E. and J.H.) at the Council's Community Learning & Regeneration Centre, who wrote and submitted the proposal at extremely short notice. Thanks is also due to another hard-working lady (G.H.) at the Oban Volunteer Centre, who made sure that projects to improve the welfare and wellbeing of the local population (youth projects, garden projects, island community projects, etc.) were taken into consideration when it came to allocating moneys that have to be spent by the end of the current fiscal year, i.e. end March 2010.

Someone has been working on the garden quietly and without much credit, growing vegetables and flowers and keeping the weeds in check while we were waiting for some substantial funding to push things along. Graham will be more than pleased to tell you all about his projects to make the productive soil even more so, such as biochar, EM Bokashi and so on.

That's it for now. Do come back soon!