Glasgow Guerrilla Gardening

A big thanks to all who came along last Saturday to help get the bulbs planted. We’ve only a few weeks to go before the 31st December and are aiming to have all the bulbs planted by then. To do so we really, really need your help.

We are not looking for any further donations of bulbs! Whilst we haven’t managed to get 1000 bulbs of each of the ten varieties we asked for we have received over 10,000 bulbs all in and now urgently need to get these planted.

On average one person can plant plant roughly 300 bulbs in an hour. So even giving up just half an hour to an hour of your time would be a huge help to us. All you need to bring is a trowel or a bulb planter or a fork, a pair of gardening gloves and yourself. Bulbs will be provided for you to plant so there’s no need to worry about what varieties to bring.

We’ll be meeting up at Townhead on Saturday 12th December at 11:30am, Saturday 19th December at 11:30am and Saturday 26th December at 11:30am. If you’ve never been along before we meet in the lane that joins Parson St and Stirling Rd just outside St Mungo’s Primary School. You don’t need any previous gardening experience or knowledge at all and we’d be delighted to see you, even if it’s only for 10 minutes planting.

Our aim is to have about ten volunteers turn up each Saturday between now and the New Year so feel free to bring friends, family and next door neighbours.

Bulb shoots are already popping up all over the site, we’re already on the way to spring 2010 being a blaze of colour but there is still room for improvement, so if you can spare just 10 minutes please come along and help out.

Tags: 2009, attacks, bulbs, dates for the diary, glasgow, guerrilla gardening, scotland, ten thousand bulb challenge, tenthousandbulbchallenge, townhead

With summer slipping by rapidly- yes it really is July not a mass calender based prank- our thoughts have turned towards the coming year. So now that you’re all depressed allow us to cheer you up by introducing the Ten Thousand Bulb challenge.

Those of you who’ve visited our site at Townhead will be aware it’s a fair old size so in order to get it looking really good for next spring we need bulbs and lots of them. We are aiming to attract sufficient donations in either cash or bulbs to let us blanket our Townhead and Wilson Street sites in thousands of blooms.

Between now and December 31st 2009 we hope to obtain and plant a whopping ten thousand bulbs and will be frenziedly panhandling for the next few months.  If you’d like to help out you can either use the paypal button on this page to make a donation, bring a bag of bulbs along to a dig or contact us to arrange to send bulbs to one of the troops. A no cost donation can also be made simply by visiting our Squidoo page as we earn royalties from traffic, sign ups and purchases made from the page. If you have a blog we’d be delighted if you would spare the time to write a short post about the challenge to encourage as many folk as possible to get involved.

If you have a business or website you’d like to promote we’ll be happy to write a short post highlighting your donation and add a link to our sidebar in return. We do get the occasional bit of press interest and this site attracts a good amount of traffic so it’s an excellent way to advertise cheaply whilst helping us out. We are also quite happy for you to publicise your donation and may be open to participating in any susequent publicity as long as we’re not asked to tell fibs, dance, dress up or sing.

Our bulb wishlist is below and we’ll keep you updated over the next few months as to how we’re getting on meeting our target and of course let you see the results once the bulbs bloom next year.

1000 Mixed Daffodils

1000 Mixed Tulips

1000 Snakeshead Fritillaries

1000 Snowdrops

1000 Mixed Crocuses

1000 Bluebells (native only please)

1000 Grape Hyacinths

1000 Winter Aconites

1000 Mixed Alluims

1000 Wood Anemome

We’ve selected the above for their ability to naturalise, visual impact and beneficial affect to wildlife apart from tulips who’re there to look nice and little else.  Successfully naturalised daffodil fields have been known to last for up to fifty years which means if we meet our target our  sites  will be in bloom for years to come.

We’ll be planting our first donated bulbs up at Townhead on 29th August at 12:30pm if anyone fancies joining us with a bag of bulbs from the above list.

Tags: 2009, dates for the diary, ten thousand bulb challenge