ReSparkle! with TTT at Tooting Library, 2pm to 4 pm on Saturday 15th December 2018

All welcome to join TTT's free Christmas crafts workshop at Tooting Library, creating beautiful presents and decorations to take home.

We've been inviting everyone to ReSparkle! since 2012, and it's always a magical event.

 

When? Saturday 15th December from 2:00pm to 4:00pm
Where? 75 Mitcham Road SW17 9PD
We'll be upstairs in the lovely children's library.  
Free, drop-in and for all ages.

All materials provided - and everything we'll use to make beautiful creations is waste that's being saved from going to scrap.
"Reduce...Re-purpose...ReSparkle!"


Thanks loads to our partners at Tooting Library - if you have any queries, please phone the Library on 0208 767 0543. NB children under 8 must always be accompanied by a responsible adult.

Come and join the fun - please spread the word and tell your friends. Click here to read or download the poster.

The fabulous OaKomotion! Carnival promenading in Furzedown: re-imagining, movement & change

Ten days ago the fabulous OaKomotion! travelling Carnival promenaded all round Furzedown.

The whole amazing sunny event was based on the sucess of the Furzedown Oak Community Project. 
In the Project community artists and host groups adopted sections of the large American Oak felled locally. Then they created sculptures to give the oak a rich and longer life. Read all about the Project here!


Oakomotion! started at 10:30 on Sunday 24th June outside Sprout Community Arts. As Fio Adamson says: 
"As soon as Vince and the Never Wilbies started playing outside Sprout at 10.30 on Sunday morning I realised that music in the streets is all we need to complete the Furzedown dream."
Read about the whole carnival day in Fio's report - read or download here.


Tooting Community Garden hosted the last part of the day. Fio writes:
"A secluded dream-place with bees buzzing, veggies growing and flowers greeting the sunshine.  The Bean Dragon made by myself and 80 others still lives and should live there for many years to come. Remember the Big Day Out 2016, Dahomey Road street party and the Foodival the same year? – yes,  you too probably chipped away then at the big piece of Oak and helped it on its way."

Here's the oak Bean Dragon - part bench, all magic:

Below there's the new Community Garden table made with young refugees and asylum-seekers from the Tooting charity CARAS.
It's inscribed in many languages with messages of welcome, and all were invited to add more. When there was no more room on top it was the turn of the table legs to be decorated. Come and see the Dragon and the table any Sunday from 11-1 when the Garden is open to all.

Really the whole day was about re-imagining, movement and change,

from a felled tree to some beautiful living sculptures; 

from all corners of Furzedown to our hidden but accessible oasis. 

Thanks to Fio and all the OaKomotion! team.

Here's the dancing finale in the garden:

Ready Steady GROW! for the 10th Tooting Foodival

The Tooting Foodival celebrates local growing, cooking and eating together. It's based on what people locally grow and donate - so we can all admire Tooting's skills and productivity. Plus we can offer super ingredients to the Top Tooting Cook contest and the chefs' delicious demonstrations. More info here.

Sowing radishes

Radishes harvested just 4 weeks later

There's still time to grow from scratch so you can donate to the Foodival on Saturday Sept 16th. It's about sharing the love rather than growing big quantities. We're  delighted by the diversity of what's donated
every year!


Starting now, what can you sow, grow and harvest for the Foodival?

If you can get sowing by the end of July, you could harvest these by mid-September:

• Rocket
• Coriander
• mixed cutting Lettuces
• Mustard Greens
• Cima di Rapa (that's turnip tops)
•  And more - do share your suggestions.

Rocket

White turnips

30 Days Wild in Wandsworth - get ready to enjoy the local outdoors for the month of June

30 Days Wild In Wandsworth is aimed at encouraging us all to share enjoying being outdoors in the city during June '17. 
Being outdoors is not one size fits all: read a book under a tree, walk to work, make a daisy chain, join in activities like the Park Run or swim at the Lido.

We're piggybacking on The Wildlife Trusts' national '30 Days Wild' campaign, a great place to start.
Go to their site online here to join as an individual or family to receive the 30 Days Wild June Calendar.

There's a link here for the beautiful ideas in Random Acts of Wildness. 

And there's a free 30 Days Wild app - get it here.

Two of us are helping frame this month of focus on the outdoors: Chuck from Transition Town Tooting and Rosie from Paradise Co-op.

Pollinator Paths Wandsworth project day: the sun shone on a busy garden scene

We had a fun, busy and instructive Sunday afternoon meeting the local participants in the Pollinator Paths Wandsworth project, and welcoming visitors who found us because we joined in with the Chelsea Fringe and Wandsworth Arts Fringe.

Getting the new planter home

People told us they appreciated being able to have a detailed and friendly conversation about how to look after and enjoy the plants they took home to their balcony, patio or garden: thank you Martin & Jo!

Tooting Community Garden was the fourth of the local gardens to host their event when we share advice and plants. Next steps include a series of seasonal workshops on topics such as composting and making insect habitats. In autumn 2017 there are next spring's bulbs to plant - and the garden and pollination year will come round again!

The community garden's 6th birthday cake

Conversations with new and old friends, exploring the space and doing new things outdoors were great parts of the day.
More news when we have it on events that everyone can join alongside the project participants. The PPW project facebook page is here.

Finishing line of the caterpillar race. We'll run it again!

Pollinator Paths workshops and the Community Garden's 6th Birthday: Sunday 21st May 12 - 4pm

On Sunday the Tooting participants in the Pollinator Paths Wandsworth project are collecting their plants to grow on during 2017. 
Come to the Community Garden at 5 North Road, SW16 1RN between 12:00 midday and 4:00 pm.

Some of the beautiful plants that project participants can grow on at home

We'll advise you on how to plant and look after them, and you can enjoy them all year as well as looking out for the beneficial insects that should be attracted to your balcony, patio or garden. For more info, click here - and everyone can follow progress and join in on facebook.

We've had our first card!

Plus, on the same afternoon everyone is welcome to the Tooting Community Garden's 6th Birthday!
We'll start celebrating at 3:00 with the caterpillar race (find your food plant!) and
we'll cut the birthday cake at 3:30.


Some caterpillars are very camouflaged, and some are very conspicuous - which kind will you be?








All welcome on Sunday!

Tooting Pollinator Party Sunday 21st May!

We'd like to welcome everyone to the Tooting Community Garden on Sunday 21st May from 12:00 to 4:00 for our free Pollinator Party!
Find us at 5 North Drive, SW16 1RN.

What's a Pollinator Party?
It's a lovely afternoon in the garden. We're mixing together fun and instructive activities that focus on planting, beneficial insects and sharing our own growing experience of city gardening, Tooting style. 

 

What's good for our gardens and insects is also good for us!

What can you come and do on the 21st?

• We'll celebrate the Community Garden's 6th birthday with games, volcano kettle tea - and a cake. 

• We'll offer practical do-it-yourself making opportunities - creating cloches from plastic bottles and inventing wall planters from textile and plywood for strawberries or herbs.

• We'll have quizzes and activities about insects and pollination - and Lola Godoy's geodesic dome to enjoy as a special habitat during the afternoon.

• We'll have a rolling workshop to distribute plants to the local people who have already signed up to join in with the Pollinator Paths Wandsworth project. Developed with London Sustainability Exchange, in this project 4 borough community gardens are each involving local gardeners (novices too) who will grow insect-friendly plants throughout 2017 on balconies, patios, at school, in the street and in back gardens. Over 60 local gardeners will share what they see, learn, enjoy and taste.

• Feel free to relax, bring a picnic (we're an alcohol-free site) - and of course do some gardening if you like.

 

 

Timetable:
We'll run all the activities throughout the afternoon - and we'll stop for tea together and blow out the candles on the cake at 3:30 pm.



We're very pleased that the day is part of both the Wandsworth Arts Fringe and the Chelsea Fringe: both full of other great events.

Love Wandsworth Food free & fun family event Tuesday February 14th

All the family is invited:

  
All invited to this  fun half-term event on Tuesday 14th February, 2:00pm-4:30 pm.
Location is The Venue, Park Court, Battersea SW11 4LD
Please sign up on Eventbrite for free here: https://love-wandsworth2017.eventbrite.co.uk

There will be lots of activities and good ideas to share on the day, all about locally grown food, eating well and reducing waste.
You can read and download a pdf of the event flyer by clicking here

TTT celebrates local food and participation in our weekly sessions at the Tooting Community Garden, and of course at the annual Foodival

This year it's going to be our 

tenth Tooting Foodival!

Sept 16th & 17th in the heart of Tooting

 

We're planning now, and if you have ideas you'd like to try out, or resources you would like to contribute, or if you would like to volunteer, come and help make it special:

• we can chat at the Fun Day on Feb 14th
• come and chat at the next Tooting Green Drinks on February 15th, 7:30-9:30pm at The Selkirk, 60 Selkirk Rd,  SW17 0ES
• come to our monthly open meeting on February 23rd, 7:00-9:00 at Al Farah Cafe, 137 Mitcham Rd, SW17 9P
• or email us at transitiontown tooting@gmail.com 

We'd love to hear from you

We had a fun & creative seasonal session ReSparkling, Reducing and Re-using materials that would have gone to waste. And Happy New Year!

Thanks loads to our partners in Tooting Library for hosting our fifth annual seasonal ReSparkle! workshop on the 17th December.
Around 40 young people - from four-year olds to teenagers - joined in for two hours, solo or with parents and carers. Everyone learned how to do all kinds of imaginative things that can be repeated or adapted at home using everyday materials saved from going to waste.

We used simple and practical methods and tools that are good for children and adults to learn how to handle confidently - folding, gluing, cutting-out with scissors, hole punching, stapling, decorating.

What did we do? (If you look carefully you can see examples of the different things that participants made in the background of many of the pictures...can you work out how to make them?)

Jane showed how to make angels using the pages of an old book destined for recycling.

Rachel showed how to make snowmen and other figures from cardboard tubes - so simple!
Plus, Hilary made cardboard boxes.

Flora helped make present bags out of the Library's out-of-date foreign-language newspapers.

Below: look at the intense concentration when learning to use the hole puncher.  

how did she keep her hat so straight?

Reduce, Re-Use, ReSparkle! Free seasonal crafts with Tooting Library on Saturday 17th December

We're running our fifth annual free ReSparkle! event at Tooting Library, 75 Mitcham Road, SW17 9PD on Sat 17th, from 2-4pm.

All welcome, for all ages and all materials provided: the theme is learning how to make decorative and interesting things - perhaps presents for Christmas time - using re-purposed materials that would otherwise go to waste.
No experience necessary...you can do all the activities, and take home what you make. And teach others at home how you did it!

The venue is the beautiful Children's Library on the first floor.
We're combining the fun workshop with artist Jeni Walker's monthly Meet and Make sessions, so we can expect a really varied group.

Click on the year to see what we made at Resparkle 2015 and Resparkle 2014 - the theme that year was 'I never knew you could do so much with paper!'


Here are two highlights, and we look forward to seeing you:

Dragon Bean bench in Tooting Community Garden: the grand opening

Yesterday we officially opened the Dragon Bean bench at the Community Garden Summer Picnic!

Gentle finishing touches last week

For the past twelve months Fio Adamson has been guiding a participatory sculpture project in the Community Garden.

About to cut the ribbon & unveil the bench

Now, can Fio rest....?

Working with many pieces of the American Oak felled on the Furzedown Rec, the Furzedown Oak Project was born.
Over this past year around 80 people of all ages have worked with Fio to imagine, draw, visualise, carry, carve and advise on what's evolved into the Dragon Bean bench.

Our Summer Picnic celebrated the Dragon Bean and good company in the Garden: we had delicious food, made popcorn and cooked potatoes on a fire, enjoyed volcano kettle tea, picked brambles, weeded the leeks, painted beautiful signs for the vegetable plots...

Lots more picnic photos on the Community Garden facebook pages

We're so lucky to have the use of the Community Garden land, loaned to us by Tooting charity Mushkil Aasaan. It means we can facilitate community projects like this and our outdoor learning with schools. Plus we can enjoy the Community Garden sessions with anyone who wishes to come, every Sunday.

We've opened the space on over 225 Sundays since 2011.

Why 'Dragon Bean'? Come and have a look!
The sculpture-bench is ready to sit or lie on in the Tooting Community Garden on Sundays from 11:00 to 1:00 at 5 North Drive SW16 1RN.
We post any updates on our Facebook pages. All welcome!

Tour de Tooting in the Press

Delighted that last weekend's Tour de Tooting makes the front page of the Wandsworth Guardian this week!

With this report on page 3

And this is Emma Brazell's short reportage film of the day on youtube.
 

Well that was fun! #TdeT

So what is outdoor learning?

For the past 2 1/2 years, TTT has been running outdoor learning classes with pupils from Gatton, a local primary school in the community garden. From weekly sessions with Reception and Year 1 classes, to 7-week projects with the Year 6 students, the classes encompass a huge range of cross-curriculum learning, developing new skills and vocabulary and allowing the children to fully interact with nature in the safe and beautiful environment of our garden.

But I still get asked regularly, what exactly is outdoor learning? So, here's a brief example of my class today, on a beautiful autumn morning with a lively Year 1 group...

After warm greetings and not-at-all-exaggerated reports on how much they had grown over the summer holidays, the children discussed the different seasons, today's weather and how the sunshine made them feel: happy, bright and a bit sweaty! We then looked at some of the plants we had been growing - a cherry tomato that I picked just before they arrived and a beetroot. They were very excited to discover that beetroot acts as a natural dye and took great delight in getting a red thumb. We also went to look at the green and yellow pumpkin that was growing in the vegetable beds.

Then we played an energetic game of seek and find, bringing back different numbers and colours of grasses, leaves, pinecones, sticks and acorns. The children learned that the squirrels love to eat acorns and hide them away so that they can eat them later in the winter; we found lots of buried acorns in the garden - sorry squirrels!

And then, while half the group help collect objects for the Big Draw, the other half used trowels (remembering the safety instructions I taught them last year) to dig up the old pea plants in their little veg bed. The plants went on the compost heap to be recycled in the garden. We all put our hands into the freshly dug soil to feel how it was drier on the top and damper underneath but was also loose like crumble mix. And the numerous worms that were unearthed during the process were all gently and kindly transported to the bush where rumour has it they were having a big worm party...

Finally, after making big shapes, small shapes and star shapes, the children exploded with an impressive "Acorns!" for their "word jump". Exit one group of happy, rosy-cheeked, energised children.
Sharon