Bike dreams do come true! Not only is our new shelter keeping your bikes safe and dry; it’s storing rainwater, diverting run off, and providing a home for all kinds of little creatures.
We’ve enjoyed working with Old School Fabrications to create a deliberately simple, robust structure, using locally sourced materials. The beautiful Douglas fir will be left to weather naturally, and the green roof will soften and change with the seasons.
Planting and maintaining our roof has been a community effort, with generous help from local volunteers, and children from Newport Primary School. It will continue to grow into a thriving biodiverse ecosystem, helping bees, butterflies, and other invertebrates. Over time we plan to add deadwood planters to the sides of the shelter, encouraging mosses, fungi, and ground-dwelling insects too. We already have a very happy resident wood wasp and look forward to seeing who else pops in!
A couple of heavy downpours have put the drainage system to test: downpipes and water butts are capturing and storing rainwater for use in the gardens and grounds. Impressed by our efforts, Scottish Water have gifted us a rainwater planter to help divert even more rain water from public drains. Watch this space – we have a rain garden in our sights!
The bike shelter has been well used by staff, studio holders and students since being installed in July, holding up to 20 bikes during our Lughnasadh celebration in August. Come along to our Kidical Mass family bike ride on Sat 10 October to help us launch the shelter officially and raise a mug of hot chocolate to pedal power!
Do you need some encouragement to get on your bike? Everyone who comes by bike to classes and workshops this October will receive a discount code for next block.
Huge thanks to National Lottery Awards for All for supporting this project.
Making Biochar!
Here at Forgan Arts Centre we are trying our best to reduce waste from our events and where possible turn any residual waste into a positive resource.
One example of this was using the post use wooden cutlery collected at the recent Lughnasadh festival. Before the event we worked with the food suppliers to ensure that the food containers supplied by the vendors were compostable, after the festival these containers were collected in a separate bin for composting onsite and then turned into compost for the garden.
Instead of traditional composting, the used wooden cutlery was turned into Biochar and added to the garden as a water retaining soil amendment and also storing carbon in the soil.
The wooden cutlery was added to our biochar kiln and the high temperature burn left behind charcoal which, once soaked in run off from our wormery*, will be ready to add to the garden beds for flower, vegetable and dye plant growing.
Biochar is a form of charcoal that is made at a high heat burn with added nutrients and microbes. The Biochar forms an inert carbon that will not decompose, so it is retained in the soil, and when added to soil or compost, the biochar helps support the soil microbes, and thus plant growth, water retention and provides nutrients.
*the wormery helps process food waste from the Centre into a high nutrient soil amendment and the liquid run off can be used as a fertiliser.
Photos show the made charcoal, the biochar kiln, and he wooden cutlery in the kiln before the biochar burn!
