Coming through the establishing of the Portobello Seed Share project earlier in the year with Access to Industry and Portobello Library, and alongside our coastal garden Shore Hunt, this programme will consider how best to nurture resilient growing systems, and ways to protect local plant diversity.
A series of events are planned in the autumn and spring providing hands-on knowledge sharing sessions led by different ecologists, scientists and community gardeners.
Sat 24.10.26, 10.30am-12.15pm
Soil Health + Microscopy Workshop with Life to Lab
@Portobello Library
What does healthy soil look like? Join Life to Lab (Mary Silk and Jamie Sommerville) for an interactive session on soil health and the living world beneath our feet. Together we’ll explore some of the organisms that go to make up healthy soil, including fungi, protozoa and nematodes, and discuss what their presence or absence can tell us. Participants are invited to bring along samples of their own soil for analysing. We’ll also discuss practical ways to support and improve soil health, that help to build more resilient, productive and ecologically friendly growing systems.
Mary Silk and Jamie Sommerville bring together backgrounds in soil science, ecology, farming and food growing to share knowledge, inspire curiosity and translate current science into practical land management. They are interested in how they can support the restoration of healthy, productive soils and the habitats they sustain, creating benefits that extend throughout the food system and ultimately to human health.
Places are limited. Please book in advance.
Sat 31.10.26, 10.30am-1pm
Samhain Seed Walk with Hannah Brazil and Olga Bloemen
Starting point to shortly be announced
Join facilitators Hannah Brazil and Olga Bloemen on a gentle seed walk around Portobello, to celebrate the recently established Seed Share at Portobello Library. We’ll tune our awareness to seeds and what we can learn from plants at this time of year, forage for seeds of wild plants that thrive in challenging places, and touch on how to identify, harvest, process and store seeds.
The 31st of October is not only Halloween but also ‘Samhain’, the start of the new year in the old Celtic calendar. Samhain is right at the threshold between the abundance of autumn and the dormancy and decay of winter.
At the same time, the rhythms of the seasons are rattled profoundly by the climate crisis and habitat loss, and the plants and creatures around us are struggling to adapt.
This exploratory walkshop will consider what we can learn from our wild plant community about resilience, remediation and repair. How can we help them adapt to rapid change? We’ll consider the specific ecologies of the area, and learn more about the importance of collecting, keeping and sharing seeds right by where we live.
About the facilitators:
Hannah Brazil is a community gardener, seed keeper and facilitator with a background in environmental anthropology. She runs multiple community gardens and nature-based projects in and around Edinburgh. Together with Olga and others she set up the Edinburgh Seed Network and looks after the Salisbury Centre Seed Library.
Hannah is passionate about tending to human-nature (dis)connection. Her work revolves around rekindling embodied relationships of care and regenerative cultural practices through community food growing and land stewardship, seed saving and exploring the stories we tell of who we are in relation to the ecosystems we share.
Olga Bloemen is a facilitator supporting community and activist groups, a poet and a gardener. She’s committed to building life-giving ecologies through challenge and change. She helped to set up the Edinburgh Seed Network together with Hannah and others. Until recently she was a fond resident of Portobello, but now she’s based just outside of Penicuik on a community-based rewilding project. She tends to agree with Mary Oliver: “There is only one question: How to love this world.”
THE RESILIENT SEED is funded by ECCAN (Edinburgh Communities Climate Action Network), with additional support from Porty Community Energy and Edinburgh’s Thriving Greenspaces.
