North Kelvin Orchard and Meadow

Glasgow needs Orchards! Ours helps locals take an interest not just in nature, but in healthily living too. They come to this 1.4 hectares of inner city community greenspace for many reasons. Kids playing in their wood, families having picnics on their meadow, dogs walking their owners. They see the fruit in the orchard, they eat it, and that then takes them further along on that journey in connecting them to nature. They then look after not just the tree that gave them apples on that picnic, but they look after and take an interest in the rest of the land. They get interested in composting as we use that to help boost the growth of the fruit bushes and trees. Kids using the orchard is very important to us, so we always aim to prune in a way that the fruit is low enough down so they can pick them.

We manage the land the orchard is on as a meadow. This means we have a meadow management plan in place. Basically the orchard and meadow are one. We’ve found wildlife especially reap the benefits of this. We’d like to study it more but it’s our belief that as the meadow flowers sometimes open at different times to the fruit in the orchard this helps wildlife. Over the years we’ve often had a lot of feedback from people saying they think we have much more wildlife e.g bumbles bees, insects, birds etc than many City parks and this could well be the reason why.

Glasgow is very near the bottom of most health tables in Europe. We and this Orchard want to do our bit to get Glasgow and her people further up that table!