Brighton Permaculture Trust would love to hear from community groups and schools who would like our support to plant new orchards (or restore old orchards).
We are making two new funding applications at the moment:
- In the north of Brighton, we are looking to support communities to plant orchards in Hollingbury, Coldean, Moulsecoomb, Bates Estate, Bevendean and Hollingdean. Here we hope to get funding from the SITA Trust to create small orchards for the benefit of wildlife and are looking mainly at grassy spaces between BHCC Housing land.
- In the Arun, Adur and Worthing area, we are applying to the Heritage Lottery Fund, and there are opportunities to be part of that bid. If you have a site in mind, that’s great. If not, we might be able to help, because both Arun and Worthing & Adur councils have said they will enable planting in public spaces such as parks.
An orchard could be anything from 5 trees to over 100. We specialise in planting rare and unusual varieties of Sussex apple, but our orchards include pears, plums, gages, etc. We plan to be planting new orchards from the winter of 2014/15 for up to 5 years.
Our funding applications will need to show that we are promoting biodiversity; history and restoration; learning new skills; changing attitudes and behaviour; giving public access; and increasing community involvement.
If your project or idea might do any of those, we’d like to talk. Even if you have only some first ideas about a project that could involve fruit trees, please get in touch. The requirements of the funders mean that we need some contribution towards the cost of the orchard from local projects; a commitment to fundraise for this is sufficient at this stage.
To get an idea of the work we do to support the planting and after care of fruit trees, have a look at our Community Orchards page.
If we get the funding, we could be doing that to help you!