Peebles CAN | Latest News

Latest News:

For the most up to date news please see our facebook page on the right --

Community Garden Reopening

We are excited that the easing of restrictions from 15th March means we can reopen the community garden to welcome our volunteers back. Tuesday and Friday volunteering from 10am-12, has been extremely popular, thank you to everyone who has joined in. From the week beginning 5th April, Monday sessions from 1pm-3 will also resume. Thank you to all volunteers who have been helping out at home by sowing seeds and chitting potatoes – you have all done a brilliant job over these early months of spring. We have lots of activities to get involved in over the coming weeks, including preparing beds for planting, sowing seeds, and planting potatoes. Please get in touch about getting involved, we can’t wait to hear from you!

Thank you GARDEN VOLUNTEERS for all the fabulous work you do in the Community Garden and behind the scenes. The work you do as a volunteer is really appreciated by us at Peebles CAN and by the local community. Have a look at this news report from The Peebleshire News, you've been featured!

Netting Structure

The long awaited netting structure is nearly completed! Thank you to those who helped with the massive job of putting the foundations in. This will be a great asset to the garden, we will be growing the majority of our brassica’s in here. We are seeking volunteer help for a bit of woodwork - to help with edging this area with a wooden border. Please let us know if you would like to assist.

Outdoor Structures

We are delighted to announce we will be beginning work on two outdoor structures for the garden. The first is a covered storage area for wheelbarrows, over by the sheds. The other is a field shelter - this looks like a shed, with large double doors . We put a lot of thought into choosing a structure which would help keep the rain off our heads – without being too attractive for unwanted visitors to use. This structure will be finished in April, and we will be using it for volunteers as soon as Covid restrictions allow us to.

NeighbourFood

We are delighted to be continuing our partnership with NeighbourFood for another year. Here is a little bit about their brilliant food project and how to get involved:

Are you looking for an easy and convenient way to access locally produced and sourced goods? NeighbourFood Peebles is an online market platform connecting local producers with local customers. Giving small business in the Scottish Borders a new innovative way to access customers in the area. We believe that the market offers a way for customers to support local business, lower their food miles and have access to wonderful local produce online. We have all come to understand the convenience and safety of online shopping over the last year but unfortunately shopping online generally means that money isn’t being put into the local economy, goods are being shipped from all over the world with high environmental impacts and our local businesses bear the brunt of this change in consumer habits. NeighbourFood Peebles offers a solution to this problem. It allows customers the perks of buying online and local businesses to capitalise on it.

Peebles CAN is delighted to be running an innovative new project – The Road to Carbon Reduction – from the Climate Challenge Fund 2020-2022

We have many FREE new courses on offer – including bike maintenance course, zoom cookery classes, virtual fuel efficiency driving course, virtual skill shares and carbon literacy. Go to our Road to Carbon Reduction page to find out more.

Digital Workshops

We are holding a six week digital workshop starting on Tuesday 25th Feb at 1.30-2.30pm targeted at beginners who wish to improve their life through increasing their digital skills. It will cover a whole range of topics tailored to your needs and level of understanding. The workshops are friendly and informal. Please register your interest at

Digital Skill shares

We are holding individual skill share sessions each month focusing on digital skills. We hosted a brilliant one on Social Media in December but feel there is much more to learn in this area and we have a brilliant volunteer from Peebles High School on hand to lead a further session on Instagram on Jan 24th - please register your interest at

If there is any digital topics you would like us to cover in the future then please let us know. We welcome all and any ideas.

Thanks to everyone who came to our Ceilidh!!!

Thanks to everyone who came to our Ceilidh, we really hope you all had a fabulous evening dancing the night away. The night was a huge success and we raised just over £2,000. We rely on these fundraisers to ensure the sustainability of CAN and we will use this money to help us continue running our projects helping the communities in Peebles and the surrounding areas.

Special thanks to the Peebles Hydro for hosting us and all the businesses who kindly donated prizes for our raffle.

Macdonald Cardrona Hotel, Venture Studios, Eddie McDowell, Barony Castle, Tunnel Trail Run, The Borders Distillery, Bespoke Cycles, Dawyck Botanic Gardens, Peebles Golf Club, Traquair House.

Huge thanks to our most recent funders

Scottish Government - We have been successful in securing funding from the Scottish Government to run a new project called Grow for All. Our project will work with participants from the local community to grow fruit and vegetables in the community garden and a new large pollytunnel at the Peebles CAN community garden to share amongst the participants and wider community.

SCVO - We have also received funding from SCVO Digital Participation Charter Fund to run Digital Discovery Learning Sessions, these will include monthly digital skill share sessions and 6 week workshops for current volunteers to upskill their digital knowledge.

We are looking forward to starting these new projects very soon.

Charitable Status

We are delighted to announce that as of 17th June 2019 Peebles CAN now has charitable status under the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Act 2005. Our charity number is SC049387.

New Garden at Tweeddale Youth Action

A fabulous new garden has been built at the Tweeddale Youth Action, designed and built by the very talented young people with help from The Conservation Volunteers. Thanks to funding from Big Lottery Fund YOYP

Vegetarian Week

Massive thanks to The Vegetarian Society for funding our BBQ and Community meal catered for by the utterly awesome Food Punks and with music from the brilliant Nomad Beat - community music school band, Celtic Beats. Everyone had an excellent time and the food was amazing, thanks to all involved.

New polytunnel for Halyrude Primary School

We had a great day with the help of some wonderful volunteers building a new polytunnel for the staff and children at Halyrude Primary School. The children are excited to start planting in raised beds within the Polytunnel and hopefully some of the produce will be used for school lunches. Thanks to Tesco Bags of Help who funded this purchase for the school

Willow weaving

On the last day of half term we welcomed both adults and children to our Willow Weaving skill share and what a brilliant turn out it was. The children played in the garden and ran through our newly formed willow structure whilst Heather lead the session instructing the volunteers how to use the newly harvested willow to form a living tunnel. We hope that in the future we will be able to harvest more willow from this and keep extending the tunnel around the back of the yurt and create a fun tunnel zone for the children who visit the garden.

It was lovely to see so many new faces in the garden, and for us all to learn new skills together – Thanks Heather, we all really enjoyed the session.

Halyrude Primary

We have spent many sessions enthusiastically clearing the raised beds of stones, planting garlic, finding insects, testing pH of the soil, building bug hotels and making staking stone art. The pupils have also talked about what vegetables they would like to grow next year.

Impact

We were delighted to be invited along to the rebranding of one of our funders VAF now known as Impact. They put on an excellent event full of fun and inspiration, we got to meet some lovely people who we hope to work with in the future.

YOYP

As part of our Year of The Young People grant awarded to CAN by Big Lottery Scotland, we have been working closely with Peebles High School and their employability program.

We are delighted to say that Lewis, Jack and Fraser all passed their employability award after 5 sessions working with our Growing Leader.

A big thank you to Tweedside Garden Machinery who helped us deliver our ‘working with machinery’ model. Well done boys

Feature on ITV News

Our "Year of the Young People" project was featured on ITV News, see our Home page or Facebook for the video and hear what our participants have to say!