Community Gardening Group Volunteers

St John's Winchester is looking for keen gardening volunteers to assist and support residents and get involved with the day-to-day gardening within our beautiful historic grounds.

The charity wants to support our residents to enjoy gardening, and we need volunteers to achieve this. We would like you to join in, come up with ideas, get involved with the planning and support this group to realise their vision.

Some of our residents have limited mobility, but we still want them to get involved – we want all our residents to enjoy our gardens whether its by completing light gardening duties or sharing their gardening knowledge.

Maybe you enjoy gardening and would like to share your knowledge with others or would like to learn more, but don’t have a garden yourself. Come along and be part of our St John’s community garden.

The Community Garden Group.

This is a new group that is being established to support the residents in contributing to the maintenance of the gardens, we have contractors that maintain the grass, hedges, clear paths and complete weeding when they have time.

What we need is volunteers to support the residents in maintaining the plants and flowers across our sites – the elements that add beauty to our gardens throughout the changing seasons. Gardening requires planning and so part of the volunteer’s role will be to work with the group to plan what needs to be done, always looking forward to the coming months.

As part of this group volunteers may also support fund raising ideas to support the materials needed for the gardens, examples of this could be running plant sales/coffee mornings.

Looking after gardens brings with it tasks that need to be completed regularly and fall outside of the contractor’s responsibilities. 

The specific areas we would like volunteers to support with include: -

• Dead heading
• Weeding
• Edging
• Greenhouse planting and potting on seedlings and taking cuttings
• Watering in the summer and considering how we can save water
• Mulching boarders
• Pot care and repotting balcony pots and planters on occasion
• Taking part in seasonal activities using materials from the garden e.g. wreath making

Proposed volunteer activity timings: -

• Attend regular (approx. every other month) Community Gardening group meeting – approx. 2 hours per meeting
• Gardening duties – ideally 4-8 hours per week (flexibility is possible)

We hope to recruit 4-5 volunteers who can work together.  The number of hours per week will vary depending on the time of year, project stage, the weather, the number of volunteers and their availability.

This is a new project and so will take time to develop.

Skills

• General knowledge of plants and gardening activities would be an advantage, but not essential
• Knowledge of garden construction or landscaping would be an advantage, but not essential
• Have ideas and enthusiasm
• Friendly and a good listener
• Reliable/dependable
• Trustworthy
• Comfortable chatting to almshouse residents and able to support those that are less mobile
• Happy to work independently when needed but also be part of a volunteer group
• Good sense of humour
• Happy to learn
•  A DBS check (at our expense) and two references are required for any St John’s volunteers

All St John’s volunteers must be 18 or over due to insurance requirements.