Category: Latest News

News of our site

Hello to our Garden Team

Lots of the people we support enjoy sessions at our Wantage Market Garden, which is part of our Gardening Project. Some people undertake gardening skills training, some take part in group sessions and wellbeing events, while others are happy to find a peaceful spot to plant some seeds or smell the scented flowers.

It’s a wonderful, calming space that is run in partnership with Sustainable Wantage. Each Friday there is a session at the garden supported by our Gardening Coordinator Sarah and our volunteers, including Olwen, Garden Coordinator for Sustainable Wantage and regular volunteer Jackie.

Here are photos of some of the regular garden team, made up of some of the people we support and regular garden volunteers from Style Acre and Sustainable Wantage.

Thank you to the garden team for their commitment to this beautiful space!

Marianne’s 2020 poem

This year has been lots of ups and downs

The virus came and everyone had lockdowns

To keep us happy at Bryan Way

We have activities every day

Cooking, baking, walking and crafts

Hip hip hooray project sunflower we achieved

And Miles and Smiles on a virtual make believe

Haircuts at home, new recipes to try and Amazon to buy

A new lifestyle we all have to try

We sanitise and wash our hands, keep this virus away

Safe distance and mask becomes a daily task

We miss our friends at T2, staying safe we must do

So lockdown scrapbook number 2 we will start

To show everyone at T2 when we restart

Corporate Volunteers at Wantage Market Garden

Since Covid-19, many of the regular volunteering roles at Style Acre are on pause so that we can keep everyone safe. But one place we can have volunteers safely is the Wantage Market Garden. And with such a large space, extra bodies can make big gardening jobs look like light work!

So we were delighted to welcome corporate volunteers from local company Vertex Pharmaceuticals to our Wantage Market Garden recently. They pruned, painted and hedge trimmed their way around the garden over two days.

To make things safe, we thoroughly risk assessed the activities the volunteers would be doing. And everyone was able to social distance in the large space of the garden.

We’re very grateful to our corporate volunteer groups who visit us for team days. They get to spend a day outside in the fresh air learning new skills and we get lots of muscle power to help our garden team get through some of those big jobs!

Thank you to Vertex for their ongoing support. To find out more about corporate volunteer days, get in touch with our volunteering team.