Come along to Edible Erdingtons Potato Day festival

Saturday 26th February 11am-3pm

Erdington High Street, outside the Swan pub, near the fountain

Free, all welcome

Over the last 12 months Eleanor Hoad and a group of volunteers have been growing vegetables on Erdington High street. Come and see the vegetable plots and join in a celebration of the humble potato.

* Display of some of the 150 varieties of potato available in the UK

* Free seed potato giveaways- grow your own spuds at home

* Enter the “Great Erdington Potato Self Portrait Competition”- decorate a potato as yourself! Prizes to be won

* Seed Bomb Making

* Vegetable Growing Advice

* Morris Dancers

* Potato Planting Demonstration

* Seed Swap- bring along seeds to swap

* Free Food

Funded by Be Birmingham and Birmingham City Council Arts Team

In partnership with Erdington Town Centre Partnership and Court Lane Allotments

Free fun for all the family at this years Apple Day.

Drawing on centuries of tradition surrounding the humble apple, ‘Apple Day’ will include:

* Live apple pressing, see and taste local apples turned into delicious juice with our amazing home made apple press- why not bring along your apples to turn into juice
* Apple expert Julian Brandram, with a display of apple varieties and fruit growing advice (www.appletrees.org.uk)
* Apple trees, pickles, preserves and produce for sale
* Fun apple games including Apple bobbing, Longest Apple Peel competition and Apple and Spoon race
* Morris dancing from 1st Sedgley Morris group
* Make a mini scarecrow to take away
* Live music from Jim Mehan
* Food
The event is brought to you by ‘PREPARE’ a project to harvest and distribute unwanted fruit in the Erdington area run by Artist in Residence Eleanor Hoad based at Twickenham Primary School supported by Birmingham City Councils Community Arts Team.

For more information contact Eleanor Hoad on 07974 934 917 or eleanorhoad@hotmail.com

Around 30 children from a number of different countries, and ranging in age from 3 to 16 years old, enjoyed the experience and all of them were able to produce a good end product, as shown below. Dr Keiany had to use all of his teaching skills to cope with such a wide range of ages, and Marjorie was a big help in that respect, having considerable experience with smaller children.

Mohsen would like to try and obtain a grant to hold a series of Art workshop to teach the mothers how to paint, as a creative and therapeutic activity, and to continue to work with the children during holidays.

Again using the ideas from Flotsam as our starting point myself and Nina brought in images of  Star fish,  Seahorses and other underwater creatures in on cards so the children could colour in and cut out. The idea was to make an underwater world like in Flotsam and give the children the opportunity to take photographs of their own magical world. The children worked very hard to create their world and a lot of glitter was split. But eventually  each nursery created something. At The Pump the staff were fantastic and really pulled out the stops. We even had the sound of water splashing. The children were very proud of what they did and each took time in the magical made up world taking photographs of the sea life they discovered. We wanted to carry on with this activity next week so both nursery’s have decided to keep their underwater world for the time being.

The feedback we have been getting from the both staff and parents for the project has been fantastic. The staff especially have said that have been amazed at how the children have got involved in the project and how much they have retained week by week. Our aim is to make being creative with the camera second nature to the children and already they know exactly what to do and what they would like to photograph. We want to take this idea further and give them the opportunity to show us how they see the world.

At The Pump I have been showing films to what is turning into a Reminiscence group for residents over fifty. We watch ‘Meet me in St Louis’ which went down a storm. We are now developing a film / mapping project with the group that will involve young people from the area. 

I am also developing the ‘Painting on Film’ which is going well although time consuming. I will post some of the work I have been doing on that shortly.

BuggyCam - Week 2

For our second BuggyCam session with the children we again brought in the puppet. Again we started of at Norton hall Nursery in the morning and went to The Pump Daycare in the afternoon. As in the previous session the puppet brought with him a ‘present’ for the children to help during the session. Infact myself and Nina had decided that we would bring a number of things to the session. The first would be David Weisner’s book ‘Flotsam’ and the second would be a box full of Camera’s. We read the book to the children, which again referenced the camera. We then told them that ‘Pinky’ had brought everyone of them a present to help them. We then revealed an old brown box which had inside eight Vtech KiddiZoom cameras. The camera’s are prefect for early years children to discovery photography. The cameras are also durable and can take a lot of bangs and knocks.

The children was shown how to turn the camera on and how to take a photograph. The big issue was getting them to look through the viewfinder. It is new to them and it will take time. They took it in turns to take a photograph of the puppet, which they enjoyed immensely.

We then played games. The first was again the ‘Freeze Frame Dance Game’ in which the children would dance and when the music stopped they would freeze and pull a face. The idea was that one child would have a camera and take a picture of the child that they thought pulled the best face. They then played a version of I spy with the cameras in which myself and Nina would ISpy objects in the room and then the children would have to photograph them.

At Norton Hall we had the opportunity to go outside to the children’s play area and take photographs of underwater themed wall murals that for the children was good because it related to ‘Flotsam’. The main aim of this session was just to get the children use to the cameras and taking photographs. 

Eleanor Hoad Erdington Artist in Residence is looking for entrants for an exciting new competition. The Urban Orchard Competition is inviting local people to enter for their chance to have a fruit tree dedicated to a person they think is important. It could be a relative, a loved one, a local hero, someone inspirational or even a favourite character from a book or film, it’s totally open. Two new small community orchards will then be planted at Kingstanding Leisure Centre and in Erdington Central Square on Saturday 5^th December as part of the BBC’s Breathing Places, Tree O’clock attempt to break the world record for the most trees planted in one hour. The fruit trees will each have a plaque installed with the winning names. A panel of judges will decide the winners, with points given for creativity.

A launch and planting ceremony will take place on both sites between 11am and 12pm on Saturday 5^th December. Winners will be able to help plant their trees, see their winning names and receive a certificate. Winners will be informed by 30^th November.

Entries need to be emailed or text to Eleanor Hoad at eleanorhoad@hotmail.com or 07974 934 917 or by filling in an entry form available by clicking the link below. Paper froms can also be collected from Kingstanding Leisure Centre reception, Dulwich Road, Kingstanding. Entries must include the entrants name and contact details, who the tree should be named after and a reason why. The competition closes at midnight on Sunday 29^th November.

The Urban Orchard is part of the ‘Prepare’ project run by Artist in Residence Eleanor Hoad and her volunteers. Eleanor has set up the scheme to make use of fruit growing in the city that would otherwise go to waste. Traveling by bike, spotting fruit trees overhanging walls and fences Eleanor has harvested hundreds of apples, pears and damsons from the Erdington and Kingstanding area. The second stage of the project is to plant more fruit trees and celebrate them.

Eleanor Hoad Artist in Residence said…

“The Urban Orchard Competition is about rethinking how unused patches of land in our city can be utilised and used to produce food. Even the smallest patch can become an abundant source of fresh organic fruit and vegetables with a little thought. The competition gives local people a chance to get involved and own these fruit trees in the hope that they will be cared for and will produce fruit for many years to come”

entry-form

BuggyCam - Week One

Last week Reel Access began BuggyCam, an innovative project which gives early years children the opportunity to be creative through photography and film. In collaboration with Norton Hall Nursery and The Pump Daycare the project began on Thursday with a group trip at Canon Hill Nature Centre. The idea was to get both organisations together for a day of fun and exploration. Unfortunately it rained but that didn’t stop everybody having a really good time. (As you can see from the photographs taken by Dave Boynton) The children loved the Nature Centre and they had an opportunity to draw the animals that they discovered. Film Practitioner Nina Jones and Photographer Dave Boynton helped during the day. I want to say a big thank you to Donna and Perminder and their teams that made the day go so well.

The day at the Nature Centre was in preparation for our first creative session which began on Friday 16th of October. Myself and Nina Jones went to Norton Hall Nursery and the Pump Daycare with loads of  ideas to get the children thinking about composition. We didn’t want to introduce the idea of cameras just yet to them and instead came to the session with frames in which the children enjoyed decorating. The idea was to get the children thinking about framing images through their everyday games and activities. We also brought  a puppet which both groups independently from each other called ‘Pinky’. The puppet will help them each week by bringing gifts that will help them during their creative Journey.

The next session is on Friday 23rd of October and ‘Pinky’ will be introducing the picture book ‘Flotsam’ by David Weisner to the children. The book is about a boy who finds a camera washed up on a beach. He develops the photographs and finds a magical underwater world he thought didn’t exist. We are trying to get the children thinking about the creative possibilities of cameras.  I will do a weekly update on BuggyCam so I can keep track of the projects development. It is quite exciting and I am very happy that it is finally underway and that  all our planning has finally coming to the fore.

I used my trusty fruit picker on a long stick, my new bike trailer and picking baskets to collect the fruit from the different sites. Shaking trees and collecting fruit in a large tarpaulin proved very successful for collecting fruit from larger trees, however many of the trees I found were very overgrown with brambles so picking with a stick was the only way to access fruit. I think some clearing of brambles to free them would be a good mission at a later date.

I met several interested people while picking one of whom was Quettie (I hope I have spelt that correctly!) she is a local allotment holder and was on her way to pick some plums so we shared our harvest with her. She had great plans to make a plum sauce recipe.