News from the Friends of Harfield Village Parks

Dear Friends
It’s been a very busy month with some great improvements in our parks.  We continue to be inspired by the generous spirit of Harfield residents who come forward to donate, time, money and gardening goodies.

Dates to diarise
28 May – Hampstead Park – create new bed and weed veg patch
5-6 November - Garden Competition - are you preparing?

May Spotlight on Hampstead
The separation of the kids and dogs in Hampstead is working well.   What used to be little more than a large walkway is seeing increased use, as we make it more secure and more attractive – this was the mission of our April work party, which was a roaring success.

Hampstead now sports a stunning new arch, thank you to Angela from Eco Fencing for installing this for us and an extended flowerbed worked on by all.   Alison Palthe has kindly agreed to maintain it – big thanks to her.  Al from Urban properties is sponsoring labour for each work party and provided overalls and T-shirts that were greatly appreciated by our hard working team. 

Donations of plants came from everyone and we had an informative talk on invasive plants by Deborah Erasmus from the CPUT Horticultural Department.  It was great to see so many people turn up to help with the collection of bags of glass which our resident potter John Bauer will be using for a future demonstration of how to convert old glass into something beautiful – watch this space!

We are working on making our work parties into fun and informative sessions where you can learn something new and swop plants with fellow garden enthusiasts.   There is also nothing better than standing back having taken part in converting a dysfunctional piece of ground into something gorgeous.

We were all well entertained by the surprise arriving of a choir organised by Tony, whose head chef at The Avenue helps to sponsor and train these young people. Very Inspiring.

We have also started the clean-up of the west side of Hampstead including the big task of cleaning and painting the wall to create a backdrop to a new and exciting area.  Big thanks to those who generously donated towards the paint- with Williams Repairs & Maintenance giving R1000 and Oblivion committing to R500 the rest being made up of numerous smaller donations.