Cultural Kitchen

A couple of weeks ago we had a cultural kitchen to mark the beginning of refugee week, within this time we organised for members of parliament to come and enjoy the cultural kitchen with us and others there.

We all had healthy halal meal which was prepared by our hardworking staff, we also celebrated refugee week. The activities we ran were facepainting and table tennis. We are running our last Cultural Kitchens of the year these are on the 13^th and 27^th of July.

Allotment Day

The START gardening, previously known as Cultivating communities, is a project we at START have set up and been running since 2005.

We directly run this as we believe having a place to think, reflect, escape and dream is important to all of us. If you are isolated in an unfamiliar country where you have little control or influence over what happens in your daily life; you may carry the burden of why you fled, who you left behind and the trauma of getting to the UK; such a breathing space can be vital. Through our Cultivating Communities - allotment project, situated on Central Park in Plymouth, we offer such a space.

We decided to give this project a real boost as it was coming up to the time where we wanted to get all of our plants in the ground. To do this we have recently held an Allotment day, with a BBQ. We ran this day on Thursday 5th July. During this time we all pitched in to help weeding and tidy the allotment. We braved the wet weather, and worked through to turn the earth and plant more vegetables and fruit in the ground. Once we had finished we had planted:

Onions

Strawberry

Marrow

Courgettes

Mint

Broad Beans

Runner Beans

Potatoes

Chillies

Sweet Peppers

Corn

Grapes

Aubergines

Rosemary

Artichokes

Rhubarb

Pumpkins

Red Cabbage

Cabbage

Purple Broccoli

Leeks

Parsnips

and Many more

We all had a fun day and got hands on with it all. Hopefully this year we will have a fruitful and bountiful harvest (if the slugs don't get there first)