Dingley Family & Specialist Early Years Centre

Summary

The Dingley Centre Reading is part of a charitable organisation which provides learning opportunities and support for children with additional learning needs and their families. The centre caters for the needs of children of a pre-school age. It is located in a corner of a residential area of Reading.

Food4Families started work with the Centre during early Spring 2010. The outside play space was little more than a strip of meadow grass and a coloured felted asphalt area for the children to run around and play. Food4Families worked with The Centre to create a vision that would provide an environment with space for growing food and as well as giving children a rich sensory experience in the garden.  Work to combine these elements is nearing completion. A colourful picket fence defines the area for food growing with brightly painted raised beds that are just right for under fives to reach and plant their favourite veg.  The garden also has a vegetable bed at ground level, made from Willow and Hazel, where families are growing food together. This summer’s crop will include courgettes, dwarf beans and beetroot.

Despite the challenging winter of 2010-11, work continued at a pace in the garden.  The centre benefited from the involvement of Brenda Goodchild, Community Artist, whose work helped to transform much of the outside space into a bright and welcoming multi functional garden for all centre users to enjoy.  The sensory garden combines murals and mosaics, created from reusing bottle tops and jar tops, old crockery and tiles, set amongst a cordon of apples, pears and soft fruit bushes. Fragranced climbing plants and plants for winter interest have been added such as Jasmine, Honeysuckle and Witch Hazel and will encourage wildlife to visit the garden too.

A small brightly painted wooden bridge links the food growing and sensory areas and is a firm favourite with the children, so too is the water feature, where the water trickles along the wall mounted guttering before splashing down onto natural stones and pebbles.  The children delight in collecting the rain water harvested in their very large water butt, which they then give back to some of their thirstier plants, such as Gun era Manicata  with its enormous leaves.

In January 2011, the centre welcomed a very special guest, when the garden was officially opened by HRH Countess of Wessex.  The journey of developing the food growing elements and the multi sensory features has enjoyed its success as Food4Families has encouraged and actively worked with parents, families and volunteers both from the community and private industry.

The final phase of work will see the addition of, compost bins, further planting in the sensory garden  and a  seating area to sit back and absorb the sights sounds and fragrance, not to mention the tasty strawberries growing in some reclaimed tyres!

 

 

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