March ‘26

We said a fond ‘official’ farewell to Alice at the end of this month, who starts a new chapter in retirement. ICFN will miss her hugely. Happy to say however, that she will continue to keep Craigend community garden and sewing group running on a Tuesday afternoon (so much for retiring!) and will occasionally support us with our activities. We wish Alice all the best!

Before Alice left, we had another busy month kicking off with some filming at Rainbow Children’s Centre. We are in the process of putting together a promotional video for funders and Rainbow was kind enough to get permission from some of the parents to allow us to film a soup making session. We had a great morning with very enthusiastic children! Thank you Rainbow!

March saw the end of our latest tranche of soup bag distribution - 370 in total in just 2 months made up and delivered to nursery schools across Inverclyde.

Our supermarket food surplus distribution pilot continued with amazing volunteers collecting and delivering crates of food (mostly bread products) to nursery schools, coordinated by a whatsapp group. Our final tally was an impressive 2.5 tonnes of food saved from landfill and instead helping to feed families. Happy to report that some of the volunteers are going to continue with deliveries but we hope at some point that there will be funding for a dedicated worker and electric van.

This month also included our annual Potato Week! Our third year, this time with the distribution of 300 pots of compost and seed potatoes for people to grow at home. Nursery schools all received 10 pots each and the remainder were shared with Parklea (on the Big Beach Clean Up activity day), Branchton, Broomhill, Craigend, The Drying Green and Belville gardens who kindly acted as points of collection for the community. Pots went quickly again and there was demand for more! It was lovely to hear people talk about how good a crop they had had last year, and some people saying they had been told about it from friends who had enjoyed it previously and wanted to try. Some people said it had started them out on growing more vegetables or it had given them a shared outdoor activity with children and grandchildren they would not have had otherwise. Everyone who had pots previously commented on the great flavour of the home grown potatoes! Another resounding success and thank you to everyone who took a pot. We look forward to seeing some harvest photos!

We ended the month with some advanced food hygeine training and more filming - this time making an instructional cooking video for home carers. Carers have 15 minute visits and need to provide food. Often carers have little cooking experience or are unsure how to cook things due to different cultural backgrounds. They do a vital job and so it was great to make the videos to hopefully give them some assistance. NHS dieticians had advised us on what to cook - mostly very quick and simple breakfasts and toast based lunches. Thank you to community chef Angela for being the star cook!

April will be all about seed sowing and planting, hopefully with some warmer weather and a little less rain!