Excell are excited to announce the first in a series of 'Project Sunshine', an ongoing project that sees staff getting out of the office and out into the community.
Project Sunshine's first outing took place this week at the Huntingdonshire Community Nursery project. The project works with special needs groups with a wide range of ages and abilities to encourage an understanding and enjoyment of gardening, horticulture and the countryside. It produces trees for the Parish Planting Scheme, vegetables and flowers for the community and sustains local varieties of fruit and trees.
The Nursery is made up of different areas, A Tree Nursery, Orchard, Bee friendly Garden, Vegetable and fruit gardens.
Project Sunshine's Red Teams task was to help construct a brand new addition to this much loved Nursery a "Winter Interest Garden". Our Mission this sunny but chilly Wednesday morning was to begin by creating a pathway for the visitors and volunteers to stroll along while taking in the wintery and interesting garden around it. We were warmly welcomed by Mary who runs The Friends of Huntingdon Community Nursery and after a strong cup of coffee and a few biscuits we all donned our snazzy red team t-shirts to take a tour of the land we would be working on.
The first thing we needed to do was get the stones for the pathway from one end of the grounds to the other, obviously the most "strong" and "strapping" men from our group Ian, Stuart, Andrew and David kindly volunteered to take on this heavy task. The girls and Chris set about transporting sand to the building area so that we could mix cement to stick these stones together.
We were instructed in the art of creating "dry mix", some of us were better than others, Natalie was accused several times of "tickling" the sand with her shovel, but we got there in the end. Once the cement was mixed we could lay this in the shape of the path and rake it over ready for the slabs. These were placed on top and levelled by Chris and Andrew who seemed to spend most of the day jumping up and down on them.
There was a whole lot of cement mixing and slab laying going on and then we were introduced to...................The Mound!!!
The mound was a great big pile of dirt that was unfortunately obstructing our path, therefore it had to go and obviously, we were the team to do it! So we grabbed some shovels and spades and began hacking at the mountain standing in our way. While most of us chose the traditional method of shovelling, David took a different approach and decided to ram his wheelbarrow into the sides of this mound and scoop the dirt in with his arms, which worked surprisingly well.
At the end of the day, after a whole lot of digging, mixing, pointing, tea drinking and biscuit munching, we had managed to clear the way for the path to go as well as laying most of it. From the blank canvas we had started with, this was a massive achievement and we were all really proud of what we had accomplished.
Not only had we begun to create something that will be enjoyed and used for years to come, but we also had a laugh doing it and got to be a part of a different team, who worked really well together!
Over the next couple of days the rest of the Red Team will be completing this project and there will of course be photographs of our efforts to come....
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