We really value skills and knowledge passed down to us from others, this is our heritage.  Over this last year through our Forest School and other projects we have worked with our local community and learned how to weave willow, make pottery, create cordage and ID local plants, we understand what plants we can eat and what other uses they might have. 

We have been learning about invertebrates, what they eat, their habitat and how we can help them to ensure that we created a biodiverse garden.  Receiving and passing on this knowledge is very important to us and we have used all these skills when creating our garden. 

We wanted to highlight the ‘Wonder of Weeds’ plants that lots of gardeners overlook or remove.  We aimed to celebrate these often-unloved plants and enjoy what they can bring to both us and local wildlife. 

To celebrate Keep Scotland Beautiful’s 25 years as a charity we have added some beautiful silver birch to our handmade bird bath.

The parts of our garden that are edible to us are chives, nettles, dandelions, borage, nasturtiums, kale.  We have chosen plants that are also edible to lots of invertebrates and that can also provide valuable habitat.

We love sharing our space with wildlife. We use our camera traps to monitor what  visits the larger part of our garden and are looking forward to doing this with our pocket garden. We used locally grown plants and sowed our own seeds that we know will attract a range of insects. We are very keen to attract moths and are looking forward to using a moth trap to see what moths are visiting our pocket garden.

We worked with our local community group, Healthiest Town Aberfeldy, who kindly donated watering cans and helped us fix our tap so we could water the garden.  One of their volunteers Susie came to help us every week, she helped us sow seeds, pot up donated plants and advised us on how to make the most of each space.

Our favourite part of creating the garden was seeing it grow and progress, it was exciting watching the plants take root and grow. 

Not all of our plants were successful, we tried to take honeysuckle cuttings but they got caught in the frost and didn’t survive.  Some of our seedlings took too long to grow so were not quite ready to be added to the garden but we hope to do that when they are ready.  Some of our bunting blew away in the wind but we were able to fix it.  Our plan had been to have willow panels all around the garden, but we thought that we would change that and reuse some of the large stones we had in our garden and that this would make an additional habitat for beetles and other invertebrates who enjoy the tiny spaces between the stones.

Our garden will stay where it is, and we are looking forward to maintaining it and putting our camera traps out to see who visits.  We are particularly excited to see if anything makes its home in our pond.