Tune in to BBC Radio Sheffield at 9am this Sunday to hear us In The Garden with Rony Robinson on BBC Radio Sheffield. Regular garden guru Neil Grant is away so once again we're stepping into the breech to help with listeners gardening questions 9:00 to 10:00. Listen online 88.6FM 104.1FM DAB.

For a week our web page was donated to the 2011 Sheffield Food Festival and there's loads of updates, phots, mentions and links on the SFF page. Click here to take a look.

Ignore my June post about the number of failed allotments in schools. The true figure is nearly 90%, despite the fact that over half of schools have a growing area. Obviously this means that there is little chance of any educational, behavioural, or health and well being outputs. For GG the reason is obvious, and the solution is evidenced by what's happening on GG plots throughout the region. All you need is some community involvement, a dash of common sense, and less red tape.

As we travel round schools we have found that over half of existing growing areas are either unused or overgrown. This clearly demonstrates that without the necessary support structures in place there is little point in just chucking money at sites and expecting the right results. That's why every Garden Gorilla site will have either community involvement or a dedicated Plot Leader. The GG model of Build, Sustain, and Educate places equal importance on each of these three areas, but it is becoming increasingly evident that without a Plan to Sustain, projects will invariably fail

In front of my house there is a lovely green stretch of grass verge. 

Couple of interesting articles in today's Sunday Express. Have posted copies onto the GG facebook and LinkedIn sites. In the first article the Food For Life Partnership seek to make a connection between healthy eating and pupil ability to concentrate, assering that good food at lunchtime makes them four times more likely to concentrate in the afternoon. The second article reports on how schools in the West Country have hired nurses to ring parents and offer one-to-one sessions on healthy eating, in reponse to the finding that one in three final year primary school children are clinically obese or dangerously overweight. Whilst you can always make an argument about the use of studies and statistics, some are difficult to refute, such as the fact that we are getting fatter earlier.
Whilst these types of reports would seemingly offer help to fledgling under-resourced social enterprises like Garden Gorilla, our own experience of working in schools tells us that teaching staff rarely cite issues such as obesity or concentration as the major benefit of running a growing programme. They usually focus on the behavioural aspects, and how the use of the allotment or growing area enhances the curriculum. On a recent visit to a school in the High Green area of Sheffield one of the teachers told us that she regarded the time spent with her children in the garden as the most valuable time she spent. Sometimes purely anecdotal evidence is the best!

A whirlwind meeting with Headteacher Rob at Rainbow Forge in Hackenthorpe has left us with an intriguing problem - too much space!

We love to talk to people and up to now we've done most of our regular talking face-to-face and through our Facebook page.