No Pane, No Gain

Harvest @ Home is one of the projects within the Cherwell Collective umbrella. Cherwell Collective's "Live, Learn, Eat, Grow" is among 23 projects from the EU and the United Kingdom that have received the European Economic and Social Committee Civil Solidarity Prize for their outstanding contribution to fighting COVID-19 and its disastrous consequences. The Collective includes the Cherwell Larder (weekly community larder) , Harvest at Home and Climatarian Kitchen (cooking courses, meal kits and weekly cafe).

Harvest @ Home aims to provide the equipment and skills necessary for people to plant, care for, and harvest their very own produce at home. They have been popping up all over Cherwell district with seed swaps and advice sessions, and are establishing allotments both for teaching/community growing and for produce for the larder.

Harvest@Home had been donated a greenhouse from a Kidlington resident, and so today we were called in to help Emily and John dismantle it and move it into one of the allotment sites.

Challenge no.1 was getting into the garden: We had the padlock code for the gate, but it was securely bolted and padlocked from inside the garden. Hmmm...it seemed the only solution was to climb the wall. It was neither elegant nor acrobatic, but all those recent GoodGym sessions shovelling have apparently built up the arm muscles enough to haul us over a wall without to much trouble. Is clambering into a garden over a head-height wall an approved access method for a Community Mission? Did the neighbours wonder what on earth was going on?

Access gained, the next head-scratcher was figuring out how one actually dismantles a greenhouse. Fortunately most of the glass had already been removed, so it was just the metal frame to sort out. Some ratcheting, sliding and prising, and we found it was surprisingly straight forward.

Next up: van loading. Once again the frame proved surprisingly easy to load. The bigger headache was the glass. How does one transport a greenhouse worth of panes of glass without shattering it all? The answer, it turns out, is upright with plenty of cardboard between panes. Duly loaded, we realised that our tub of bolts carefully removed from the greenhouse frame had gone AWOL; the combination of yellow push car with 'secret' compartment and a tub of small shiny objects having proved irresistible to Cherwell Collective kids. Bolts reclaimed, greenhouse loaded, garden relocked and wall rescaled, and we were off to the allotment plot.

An hour of unloading later we called it quits for now. The greenhouse will be reassembled in the next couple of weeks ready to grow lots of lovely fruits and veggies for the Cherwell Larder. I don't envy whoever gets the task of the glass jigsaw puzzle as they put the structure back together at it's new home!