After getting to know people at the Beacon Centres community cafés, I was invited by Kate the centre manager and the community connectors Willy and Beth to chat about the garden at the back of the centre. From that meeting the Beacon Seedlings was born, a weekly garden group supported by Beth, Willy and I. Willy and I went door knocking and met Carol, who had not previously been to the centre, but now comes every week, usually with something to use in the garden, whether it be slates for signs or connections for the hose!

We are a small group but hoping to encourage more people in the community to get involved, whether that be helping with watering or sharing their skills to build bird boxes, which we are hoping to do over the summer. We recently encouraged groups that use the community centre to adopt and a decorate a potato sack. The sacks were made by the Beacon Centres craft group and have been planted up by the groups involved, we are hoping for a good harvest to share with the community in the autumn.

We are learning together and teaching each other new ways of doing things, not everything has worked (we had all our seedlings eaten at one stage) but we always have fun at the sessions and are slowly building in places for wildlife too. Mustafa, who has moved from Oman to Exeter, has been teaching us the Arabic names for some of the vegetables we have been planting, he is a very patient teacher! We have been able to use some of the Wildlife Trust cards to help learn some of the names of the wildlife we see in the garden. In the summer we are hoping to get the community involved in building a bug hotel and creating prints of the plants we grow with a print workshop.

Top tip from the Beacon Seedlings: Get creative with signs! One member of the seedlings hand painted a beautiful sign on a piece of wood from a skip, to hang on the gate to invite people to join us. As soon as it went up we had people coming in to see garden and a new seedling joined the group!