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We are excited to announce that starting on Wednesday 16 September we will be running a new weekly group from 1-3pm. Gather and Grow is a calendar of seasonal and social activities themed around nature, creativity and gardening put on with funding from Awards For All and delivered by artist-educator Sarah Palmer. We already have built up a thriving craft group that meets twice weekly, we want to build on that success of being creative and making community with Gather and Grow

Site in the last week of August. Our site really needed the rain we had last week, and now the temperatures have dropped there's a distinct feeling of a season change in the air - these teasel heads have gone to seed, and they will be a welcome food source for the goldfinches that visit our green space and community garden.

On Wednesday 2nd September 2026 at 2pm we'll be having our AGM with our board members and staff, Charley and Sarah, all welcome.

Last week our volunteers prepared veg boxes with fresh produce from our site all ready to go out to ECHO and Oasis Nunsthorpe food bank, in the boxes are brambles, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbages, spring onions, radishes and aubergines - such a colourful haul!

On Tuesday 28th July we put on our first HAF session of the summer with a group of children and parents from the Oasis Community Hub in Nunsthorpe. We went on a nature trail, did some outdoor activities, did some mindfulness colouring created some habitats, did an eye-spy and sat around our 'campfire in the woods'. It was lovely for the site to be used for the benefit of our local community, and full of people enjoying our nature space. If you'd like to hire our space for nat

We are growing tomatoes in this bay with marigolds as they are great for repelling common tomato pests, they also look lovely and fill any space in the soil so less weeding is needed. We grow organically on site, so no weedkillers or fertilisers, and we water with what we get pumped from our bore hole that taps into the water table. Tomatoes and marigolds in good company.

This is Glenn, who joined us as a volunteer a few months ago. He's been helping out with invaluable maintenance tasks on site, but also been learning about gardening and growing. A few weeks ago he planted some carrot seeds, and says that he's enjoyed sowing something and then nurturing and watering it.

On Monday Charley and I had a day trip out to get some ideas and advice from a couple of amazing folks - Alison Walling from Lincolnshire Willow who showed us around the farm where she works next to the Rivers Rase and Ancholme, and then in the afternoon we went to visit the ever-amazing Ernie at Your Place Grimsby, if you've not been to this East Marsh oasis then do go! Where the River Rase meets the River Ancholme. Your Place in Wellington St in Grimsby.

This morning we had a lovely set of visitors, the nursery class from Great Coates Primary School, who had a lovely time wildlife spotting in our orchard and woodland, doing a bear hunt, apple printing and sowing basil seeds. I read bits from The Magic Garden by local author Josie Moon as we were making our way around the nature walk! The nursery class with their pots of basil seeds.

A selection of our raffle prizes - all in all there was £1000-worth! We drew our summer raffle on June 30 - thank you to everyone who donated great prizes including afternoon teas, golfing rounds, food and drink, compost, lawnmower servicing, GTFC tickets - we we were really well supported by local businesses, so thank you! Prize winners have been contacted and we are sorting out getting prizes to winners!

Our late June apples. Did you know that our site is home to a heritage apple orchard? After the Second World War when agriculture intensified orchards and hedgerows were seen as a hindrance to modern ways of farming and were removed. The view at the time was also that other countries such as America and South Africa could do apple growing better than here. We now import three-quarters of the 500,000 tonnes of apples we eat a year, and the varieties we bite into are now much m

Cinnabar moth caterpillars on ragwort. Poplar hawk. Mullein caterpillar. On Saturday 20 June to celebrate midsummer we worked with some of our talented local naturalists Mick, Paul, Dave, Andrew, John, Tim and Martin, to do a bioblitz on site. Apart from being great fun, this is was an important activity. We need to have a baseline so we are more aware of what we have on site, and this means that we can make more informed decisions about rewilding areas or making more habitat

Our stall at the event on June 10 2026. We attended the Humber Environment Conference at CATCH in Stallingborough on Wednesday 10 June talking to attendees about our community garden and listening to some great speakers including Lucy Marshall from the Environment Agency, Linda Whicker from the University of Hull and Andrew Gadd from Footprint Services.

There are times, with this site, when you have the place to yourself, that the genius loci, or spirit of place bubbles gently to the surface. 112 years ago before Green Futures was the Vanson Centre council nursery, before it was Bradley Nurseries, before it was the retirement dream of William Thickett, this area was a meadow and pinfold in Bradley Parish; alive with grasses, wildflowers, insects and birdsong, glowing year after year under midsummer sunsets. This acreage was

Nature journaling page We are now into June, and the start of meteorological summer, this journaling page celebrates what we had in bloom on site in May. Nature journaling is a great way to be curious about what's growing and makes you really slow down and notice what nature is up to. It also makes you celebrate new arrivals and mourn losses. Some plants, like calendula will light up our site all summer long, whereas others, like wisteria or mahonia have a growing season that

Marsh orchid in bloom. Our marsh orchids in our wetland are now in flower, we only have a handful of these lovely magenta flowers, but we have anticipated their return and were very happy to find them in the long grass.

Our volunteers at lunch. We couldn't do what we do without our amazing volunteers. Today we said thank you to our Tuesday group of volunteers with a lovely buffet from Grab and Go and some homemade carrot cake and thank-you postcards. Our lunch room was packed while it poured with rain outside!

Wow! What a great turn out, despite the heat, we had plenty of visitors to our annual Artisan Market on Bank Holiday Monday. We were so busy we didn't get chance to take many photos but here's a selection of some of the stalls. Special thanks to Lincs Inspire for letting us use Bradley Pitches car park and the wonderful folks from the Rotary Club who helped to organise the parking for us. We are still selling raffle tickets for our Summer Fundraiser if you want to contact us

On Wednesday we had 15th Grimsby Rainbows visit our site to do the nature walk and activity book. We just about managed it before the rain set in and we decamped inside to do some watercolouring and nature-themed activity sheets. If you'd like to bring your community group to our site for a visit then please DM or email admin@greenfuturesgrimsby.co.uk

You can see our site along Bradley Road now our bright-pink banner is up. It's not long now til our Artisan Market. You can't miss our promotional material for this year's event as it's bright pink! We've now got our banner for the event up outside our gates. If you are planning on coming we've got Bensley's ice cream, a raffle with some great prizes, the Ark, Bone Art and Oddities, Allen Stichler wood-carving demonstrations, Hawkmoon Crafts who is providing felting demonstra