Earby Village Green

Earby, originally Eurebi, Danish for 'village by the stream', was part of King Alfred's Danelaw (a bid to keep those pesky Vikings out of the South). "Let the north deal with them, the people of the north are common and uncivilised anyway..."

You wonder sometimes if that view is still commonly held, as many small, rural, northern towns and villages have been forgotten in the expansion of large towns and cities in the south of England. Locally, the people of Earby feel our small town is neglected, overshadowed by our larger cousin Barnoldswick. This is exactly where we can take advantage! Earby offers a genuine sense of community.

Our town is a beautiful place to live and grow. There are opportunities to come together, support one another and put OURSELVES on the map!

Seasonal Recipes - Courgette, Bacon & Cheese Pasta Bake

One of the first offerings from the planters has been courgettes, they are a nice easy one to grow, and you can expect 3 - 4 courgettes a week from each plant! Harvesting them as soon as they’re around 4” ensures the plant keeps producing well. So we best get sharing some recipes to inspire you. First up is an easy pasta bake. Bacon and cheese perfectly complement the courgettes, and make a great introduction to courgettes for children.

E.G.G. Map & Sunday Gardening

As you may have noticed in the links at the top of the website, we have pages titled 'Map' and 'Events'. We thought it was time to give you a little bit more info about each, and in particular tell you about 'Earby Guerilla Gardens Sunday Gardening'. Now we're cracking on with projects, we thought it best to have a regular weekly gardening session to tackle all the different areas, and to get people interested, involved  and sharing their ideas! 

BIG Update - Earby Planters Are In Place!

It’s been quite a while since we last updated the website. Although we have been very quiet here in the virtual world, we have been very busy in the physical world, and want to bring you up to date with all our exciting news!

After a lot of planning, setting up, forming a constitution, insurance, council meetings, food demos, fundraising, etc. We decided that the easiest and quickest way to get started with growing edibles for the people of Earby was to use planters. Chevaune sourced 15 large crates to become planters for growing a variety of fruit and vegetables. We asked for volunteers and local artists to help paint the crates, and received wonderful donations of paint from local decorator George Boocock. Seeds had been sown, and plant pots filled our windowsills, polytunnels, any spare space we could find. Then we started contacting councils to work out the siting of all the amazingly decorated planters, and...boom...suddenly all our lives changed drastically. COVID-19, lockdown, social distancing, furlough; the world suddenly stopped, and our ‘normal’ was no more.

Seasonal Recipes - Steamed Apple & Marmalade Pudding

Earby Guerilla Gardens, aside from actual gardening, is about food. Growing our own fruit, vegetables and herbs, and by making them freely available to the community, we hope to demonstrate how food can bring people together, connect us to where we live and help to boost our mental wellbeing. Access to seasonal, fresh food, and the sharing of knowledge/recipes, may also inspire healthier choices, alongside championing local businesses, producers, suppliers and growers, so we can really make ‘local’ the preferred choice! 

As we’re only just starting out, and with spring planting a couple months off yet, it’s our local businesses who will provide essential ingredients. S & B Fruits is Earby’s local greengrocers, and the first port of call for inspiration for a winter pudding that is definitely not healthy, but absolutely delicious!

Our first blog.

Hello and Welcome!

This is our very first blog post. We've been slowly progressing with the development of our Earby Guerilla Gardens organisation and are hoping to make much more progress in the New Year 2020.

So, what have we been up to lately?

Well, we originally set up a private Facebook group to gauge the level of interest in this kind of project back in late 2017 but there wasn't a whole lot of interest, so life kind of took over and it remained on the back burner for quite some time....until around Autumn 2019, when Amanda Inman resurrected the idea with Chevaune Paul and the level of interest in doing a project like this had risen significantly, to the point where we could no longer ignore it and we had to make a plan...

Our Hopes

The Earby Guerilla Gardeners private Facebook group grew quickly from 8 members to around 45 with lots of people wanting to get together and get things started. We kind of toyed with the idea of joining the Incredible Edible Network (and may still yet) but we really kind of like our own name, so for the moment, we are staying as an independent group.

The organisational simple constitution was drawn up similar to some Incredible Edible constitutions in November 2019 and we have an interim Chair and Treasurer and a PR Officer assigned for the initial set up period (while we find our feet) and then we have to do all the proper Annual General Meetings and elect people officially......paperwork....boring....blah, blah, blah.

Official bank account has been opened - that was the easiest task to do!

It's funny, you kind of think this kind of thing is easy to set up, but in actual fact, when you delve a little deeper, the amount of stuff you have to trawl through is humungous, and that's just looking at Public Liability Insurance and do we need Employers Liability - but we don't employ anyone, but what about our volunteers (we are ALL volunteers by the way!) do we need something to cover them? God only knows!?! Anyway, we've got some quotes to cover all the things we need to cover and hopefully that will all be in place ready to start mid January.

The next steps were, we needed to identify places where we could improve and grow, so the Earby Guerilla Gardens Map were developed. We then had to go to council meetings to find out who owns what land and if they were going to allow us to do it and it looks like we do have some support.

Website and social media time! Fortunately, this area was slightly easier as some of us do have an interest in this field. Domain name purchased and linked to a blog site (the one you are currently reading), template site theme applied, linking pages and maps and calendars and creating official public social media page.......all either done or well on their way to completion. All of this takes up volunteer free time.

One thing we are keen for people to know, is that we are not governed or run in any way by the local council, we are just people who live in the town who want to make it better.

It was pointed out that another local town, Barnoldswick, always seems to get projects and improvements while Earby is always kind of forgotten about, so we want to change that and if we have to do it ourselves then that is what we will do. Let's get Earby back on the map.

and Our Fears..

We are kind of worried about vandals potentially undoing our hard work, and we really hope this doesn't happen as we rely not just on the time that our volunteers freely provide us but also on the generous donations from local people and local businesses to help get us going with plants, compost, tools and it would be so disappointing to the town to have it ruined.

But, let's not let that get us down before we have even started, change starts small, maybe we could inspire some of these people into helping us.

New Year 2020

Spring believe it or not isn't too far off and it will be full steam ahead, so we will be in the planning stages for now ready for April and we will hopefully have a plan for what plants are going where soon. If you have an interest in this field, feel free to drop us a line or come and help out we would very much appreciate it.

Let's make 2020 the year Earby Community starts to see changes!

Thanks for taking the time to read our epic first blog post. We look forward to meeting you soon!