York House Community Gardens Was Assessed as Outstanding Again This Year by BIB Assessors!

York House Community Gardens Was Assessed as Outstanding Again This Year by BIB Assessors!

The RHS It’s Your Neighbourhood Assessors were very complimentary indeed in their comments about York House Community Gardens, awarding us ‘Outstanding’ and giving us a score of 96 out of 100! And it was because of evidence of our sustainable horticultural practices at York House Community Gardens that we gained the Regional Award for ‘Caring for the Environment’.

The judges and the IYN assessors were impressed by No Dig Gardening, and mulching using woodchips from the town Christmas trees, as well as with cardboard, leaves and home-made compost. They also liked the new guttering feeding into the new water-butts, the innovation with Huegel-Kultur, and the garden of pollinating plants.

Another aspect of the community gardens they praised was communication to the public about what we do, with the Information boards with QR codes, and the Open Day in the summer. The comments from the In Bloom judges highlighted the success of vegetable growing for the Foodbank.

The only area for development that they mentioned was that they’d like to see more events using the performance space area in the orchard.

They ended by saying: ‘We encourage you to keep up the fantastic work you do in meeting the changing needs of the community and developing the York House Gardens.’

York House Community Gardens clearly helped Stony Stratford in Bloom to win the Small Town Trophy, and with Gold.  And it definitely played a part too in us being selected to represent the Region in the National Finals next year. We feel it’s a great honour to have been selected.