The
Gardener
Spoken by Ken Smith

I wanted to grow fresh fruit and vegetables really. I was working at the Brierley Hill Project, that’s a community support project and they have a food bank there. We were giving people food parcels, most of these families were struggling financially. I was aware the nutrition in the food was not good, I mean it was good food but tinned vegetables, particularly potatoes, contain a lot of sugar because it is used as a preservative.
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I made some initial enquires with supermarkets about maybe getting access to fresh fruit and vegetables. That was possible but logistically it’s very difficult, storing it is an issue, then maintaining the food quality and freshness is hard. I knew about Hawbush Gardens but I had no idea there was availability. The chap who was responsible for it said “we’ve got some allotment space available if you want to make use of it”. So I came down and first visited in June 2014. The place was a jungle but I wasn’t put off because if you can grow good weeds you can grow good crops. Being a soil scientist I dug a few holes and was satisfied that the ground was good, then I was given access to the site and told to get on with it if I wanted to use it.

I probably worked for two or three weeks just on my own clearing it and I was determined to do it step by step. Then Stuart appeared, a mutual friend who lives locally. He’d been sent down by someone at the Brierley Hill Project who had said “you need to see Ken because he wants to do some work in the gardens”. So he joined in and it was great, the pair of us cleared up to a certain point. It was hard work but we thought it was something that was worth doing, we quite enjoyed it and we had a good time putting the world to rights.

I first became interested in gardening through a small patch in the family garden. My dad said “this is your bit and you do what you like with it” and I enjoyed it. I rather stumbled into Soil Science at Newcastle University, having first opted for Medicine. Medicine was a disaster, I didn’t enjoy it at all, the anatomy is difficult. When I failed at medicine it was because I fooled around and behaved like an idiot. After I got thrown out of Medicine I then decided I’d try to get into agriculture which is what I always loved.
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I have in my working life been to a lot of different countries and I spent quite a few years in Romania working with orphanages setting up an agriculture project. I’ve been to Vietnam with the UN Atomic Energy Authority who recruited experts from about six or seven European countries. We were all airlifted to Ho Chi Minh City, locked up in an institution for a week and told to write guidelines for sustainable agriculture. The first thing I said is “I don’t know anything about farming in Vietnam”, so they reluctantly agreed to take us out and we learnt an awful lot by going and talking to the farmers. We did produce a manual but you can’t really do it in a week, it’s ridiculous. The problems and technical issues you address in that line of work are different in different places but the principles and the way you engage are always the same. Even when dealing with farmers in this country, you can’t just come at it as an academic. To me Hawbush Gardens is all about the community and growing stuff is kind of incidental really. I think as we got more established here you get to know some of the families and you get to have a feeling for the community here.




Last year we grew a lot of apples, there were loads of cooking apples probably 20-30KG. Potatoes, tomatoes too and then there have been other things like runner beans which go well. We did a bit of an inventory of all the crops and believe it or not there were about 23 different crops we grow when you look at everything. Things like beetroot grows really well and turnips too, rhubarb is great but there’s not that many people who eat it these days. I’d probably like to try in the future and focus more on carrots and parsnips, we grew a few cucumbers last year and people enjoyed those. I think really it’s just trying to encourage people to use more fresh fruit and vegetables, nutritionally it’s far better for you and it may encourage them to grow some themselves. There’s something really nice about growing your own food, especially if you do it from seed. You look after it, harvest it and eat it. I think it’s great to sit down to a meal where virtually everything on the plate is something you’ve grown yourself.

This year at the gardens we’ve provided freshly dug potatoes which people love and tomatoes. I’ve been cleaning and washing the tomatoes and bagging them up into half kilogram bags, the potatoes are put into 2KG bags. With fresh stuff particularly like tomatoes I’m taking it directly to the Brierley Hill Project where we have the drop-in centre Monday, Wednesday and what’s called a recovery cafe on Wednesday and Friday. They make up food according to the number of people it’s for, I used to do it when I first started. You get into a routine of doing it and the shelves are all stacked according to the different foods. For a family of four they’d get about four or five large carrier bags full of food. There’s a rough guideline of weight so you know roughly what it should all come to, all the food is weighed in, weighed out and recorded.

The potential is here and we do have the opportunity to impact positively on peoples lives at the gardens. Not just in a material sense by giving them stuff but you’re giving them opportunities to use the gardens as a resource. They do come and use it, I know from feedback from doing questionnaires when we’ve had events. The overwhelming response is very positive about how people enjoy it, particularly the children. We have a catchment of a few hundred people who occasional visit but I’d say there’s a core of maybe 100 people who come on a regular basis in one way or another. That’s built up from a handful when we first started. Last year we had two different groups come from Pens Meadow. The one group really enjoyed it and even if it was raining they still wanted to come, it was lovely having them and we got to build quite good friendships with them. For instance when Jess my son’s dog was poorly they did a card for her. They all wrote messages for her, signed it and there was also a picture on the front with them with Jess.
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Jess is part of the gardens. I was down in Devon on holiday with my two kids. We visited a farmer who I needed to see for work and it was just after lambing time. They asked if the kids wanted to see the lambs, Jess appeared and tagged along. They bred Jess on the farm but a local family had her as a pet for two years and so had never been properly trained as a sheep dog. The family couldn’t keep her so she went back to the farm. My son was making such a fuss over her and when we were due to leave the farmers wife said we could take her with us if we liked. It was out the question at the time but my son latched onto that and eventually he asked me to ask the farmer again if we could have Jess. I rang them and asked them if they meant what they said about letting her go. The farmer said she was ours if we wanted her. She just loves people and she automatically makes a beeline for anyone who arrives and introduces herself like she did with me the first time I met her on the farm. The Pens Meadow lot love her and it got to the point where if she wasn’t here and they turned up they would say ohhh where’s Jess? It seems like half the reason they come to the gardens is to see her.



There’s a tendency for people to think “oh I’m never going to be able to do anything”. I think the fact people come here and do achieve things, enjoy it and get involved helps to build confidence. It may be they physically can’t do a lot but that’s beside the point, I believe everybody has a gift and it’s trying to discover what that is. It doesn’t have to be with gardening but it’s important to have them involved, contributing and learning. I’m learning all the time, I used to work with farmers but I think it’s very different when you’re growing something yourself. Like the using the poly tunnel to grow tomatoes, there’s a lot to learn. Even just putting the supports up with the wires, if you put a lot of tension on them you suddenly discover the ends of the tunnel are being pulled in, so how do you deal with that? But you do, you eventually figure it out, you become more confident.



A couple years ago one of the guys who used to lead our church in Amblecote phoned me up one day out of the blue and said he wanted me to meet somebody. I went over and we had some lunch, it was an American guy, a millionaire who was setting up projects around the world in places like Indonesia, India and Africa. Peter was introducing me as somebody who should be involved. This guy had put a lot of money into some projects and they’d got so far and nothing had happened. People had ripped him off and he felt disillusioned and cheated. He was trying to persuade this guy that I should be involved and I should go to Indonesia on the next visit. I didn’t feel like it was right you know, I said I had just got involved at Hawbush and we were at the beginning of the work. So I stayed at Hawbush, I really feel this is where I should be. I believe I’m here because that’s where God wants me to be.
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I found God when I really was in a desperate condition and I didn’t care whether I lived or died, yet God spoke to me. A guy was speaking about depression in a church which I set foot in one Sunday night. The only thing that was missing from what he was saying was my name. At one point he said “it doesn’t matter what you’re going through, you need to know that God loves you.” When he said those words it really sank into me and I realised it was true, I found myself in tears. I went into the church in a terrible emotional wreck. I felt as though if I tried to eat anything I’d have been physically sick and the first thing I felt when I Ieft the church was hunger. It changed me.
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People do often want to know why you’re doing what you’re doing. My faith has completely changed me and that’s why I do what I do and to me that’s more important than anything, to share the truth of God’s love for people. I always respect what other people believe and it’s ok to disagree on things. This is a secular organisation exactly as it should be, but I make no secret of the fact that the reason I’m involved here is because God loves people.

It concerns me that the loss of a few key people means this place might fold. I think we need to get more involvement from the community. I would like the community to embrace it because in a suburban area like this there isn’t much of this facility around. It would be tragic if this fell through, I worry the gardens would be sold for development. I want the gardens to have an identity, a legacy into the future so if I came back here in 15 years time the gardens would be thriving and people will be using and enjoying them.