The main aim of the gardening team is to allow people from Mudlarks to gain work experience and extend their skills.
On Wednesdays, a team of four people go out to a garden that needs a little T.L.C. These are mostly private gardens but we have also cleared a paddock. The jobs we carry out range from trimming hedges and weeding flowers beds to planting new ones and general tidying of overgrown gardens.
The diary for 2010 is filling up very quickly. We now have a list of regular customers and continually receive calls for one-off jobs such as putting up a fence or laying turf. If you are thinking of having your garden done and can't decide on a contractor, here are some reasons why you should choose us:
- you will be helping to breakdown social prejudice towards people with learning difficulties and mental health issues.
- you will be helping people acquire real work experience to help them gain employment.
- all payments to us go straight back into helping run the project; there is no profit made.
- we use only organic, natural gardening methods, for example, we weed instead of spraying.
- we never use harmful chemicals.
- we act responsibly by recycling garden waste through composting and burning logs in our wood burning stoves in the winter and only burn branches when necessary.
Here is a list of just some of the work we have had the chance to get involved in:
- Designing and planting new beds
- Building a child’s garage
- Paddock clearance
- Tree and shrub planting
- Grass seed sowing
- Fruit tree pruning
- Dismantling old sheds
- Building fences
- Hedge cutting
- Tree and shrub pruning
- Weeding, edging and mulching
- Dismantling old decking
