B&Q to the rescue

Thanks to Essex Flour and Grain, we're well on our way. But to make the meadow really amazing, we also need to set up a Community Growing Scheme.

The reason is that there are lots of shady areas on the site, so it takes a little longer to get really spectacular flowering plants to grow there. The best thing to do is grow woodland plants in pots, then when they get a bit bigger, transplant them.

So that's the plan. But to do it, we'd need a truck load (literally) of seed compost and all the pots we can muster.

Luckily, Sam Parry from Hackney Council mentioned the B&Q One Planet Living Grant. Community groups can get up to £250 worth of B&Q stuff to get their project going. And after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, the Leyton Mills store agreed to give us everything we need. So the Community Growing Scheme is going ahead too!

If you want to apply for the B&Q grant too, you can find all the details here. They're really busy people though, so my best advice would be to keep calling again and again and again. Stalk them, basically. Until you speak to the right person. My other top tip would be to contact more than one store. The only restriction is that the store has to be less than 20 miles away. So if you're in London, and the Leyton store turns you down, try the Waltham Forest one. Or the Greenwich one. Just keep trying.

And if you're interested, here's the proposal we made up for the grant. It's an adaptation of the other funding document, so it wasn't as much work to produce as it looks. And if you apply, you certainly don't have to go into this much detail. A letter and a phone call would probably do. But here's what we did: