Swindon Saplings Youth Conservation Group

So, with the changing of the website and our busy lives getting in the way, it turns out we may not have posted an update for the whole of 2024, so it is hard to know where to start!

So let’s start from the very beginning…a wise woman once sang that it's a very good place to start! So as a group, we have been involved in a variety of mass tree planting sessions with our local wildlife trust, planting trees in areas around Swindon and regularly attending these sessions throughout the winter months. We have also been heading out into nature to learn more about birds and to practice our photography skills.

We are so lucky to have a really beautiful park with a large variety of birds, which regularly visit feeding stations and are fabulous for the children to be able to spot, identify and photograph whilst we sit quietly admiring them. We were invited to be included in the South West in Bloom’s entry at the Chelsea Flower Show, where our children used a variety of plants and edible flowers, to create a ‘pizza pallet garden’, highlighting how easy it is to grow all the items needed to create a delicious topping for a pizza, as well as the side salad and dessert (strawberries and mint - yum!).

We have been busy maintaining our community allotment plot, carrying out regular sessions to keep on top of weeds and growing our own fruit and veg. The children have particularly enjoyed all the strawberries and raspberries which grew over the year! We also had some fantastic success with our potatoes. At the end of the growing season, we got together and, using cooking stoves, the children made Green Tomato Chutney to use up the green tomatoes which hadn’t ripened. They were able to take this home and share it with family and friends.

We visited our local nursing home and enjoyed playing games and singing songs with the residents. Everyone particularly enjoyed the bouncy balls on the parachute games, and the residents loved to play Scrabble and Chess with the children.

Over 2024, we managed to remove 40 bags of rubbish from our local parks, beaches and green spaces. Our litter picking efforts spread even as far as Oamaru, New Zealand, when Jools & Brea decided to go for a litter pick around the bay where Little Blue Penguins would emerge from the water every evening and managed to collect an entire bag of rubbish over just a couple of hundred meters of rocky shoreline.

We have been up to lots already for 2025, so I will leave that for another post! Swindon Saplings :)