Our first gardening date had quite an impact. It was a working weekend with Chug volunteers. They stripped the rust off the allotment and painted it white. Well done all it looks amazing.
Planned over the next few weeks; Duck house and duck area being built for our imminent arrivals – seven White Campbell ducks, willow trellis for the allotment; some children to come down and decorate the floating barge.
Please contact if you would like to get involved in any of our schemes.
Pipistrelles are tiny bats with reddish-brown coats and blackish-brown ears, nose and wing membranes. They are common throughout Britain. Like other bats, pipistrelles are nocturnal. They emerge at dusk to feed for a couple of hours before returning to their roosts.
In the winter they hibernate in trees and buildings. In the summer they use trees, buildings and bat boxes to roost. Pipistrelles are agile, fast fliers.
During the breeding season males defend a territory, Females visit these territories and after mating give birth in June and July, usually to a single baby. Bats are mammals and feed their young milk. After about three or four weeks the young bats are able to fly and leave the roosts in August.
IMPORTANT: if you find a sick or ailing bat, you should not approach or handle the animal but seek advice from the Bat Conservation Trust.
What does it eat?
Small insects, such as moths and gnats. A single pipistrelle can eat 3,000 gnats in one night.
When will I see it?
At dusk and during the night from April until September.
Where will I see it?
Flying throughout the garden at night. Also in parks, open woodland, marshes, farmland and urban areas.
Anyone who has been to one of our fundraising events recently – this is where some of the tea-and-cake cash has gone. CHUG recently bought some new pontoons to join together the moorings on the two sides of the basin, and volunteers spent the day collecting them and putting them together, with the aid of a leaky drysuit and a lot of trial and error.
Joining the two sides is important because at the moment the moorings are cut off from the canal towpath – access to the basin is through the new development on Kingsland Rd. This makes it impossible to hold events that draw people in off the towpath, like last year’s hugely successful cafe that ran every weekend throughout June, July and August.
It will be another few months before the development on the southwest corner of the basin will be finished, and the towpath access will be open again. Keep an eye on the website, sign up for our newsletters (bottom right of the homepage), or like us on Facebook to find out about events coming up.
The CHUG allotment featured in the Evening Standard on the 12th of September, 2012. They caught wind of our allotment project and their Homes and Property section got in touch and interviewed CHUG’s Val Easty, top allotmenteer.
The article goes into detail about the choice of veg we grow – ‘cut-and-come-again’ crops like spinach, salad leaves and raspberries, rather than one-offs that wouldn’t go around all of the basin dwellers. They were also interested in the drainage of what is effectively a giant container garden, the difficulties we had along the way, the sad demise of the duck population and the introduction of worms to the allotment.
Neighbours – come and say hi over a cuppa and a piece of boat-home-made cake!
Residents have now moved into to the first completed blocks around the basin – Downham Wharf, at the north east side of the basin, and Commercial Wharf and Canal Wharf off Kingsland Road. To welcome our new neighbours and give old & new residents a chance to meet, CHUG is holding an informal Residents’ Tea Party at the moorings: Please join us on Sunday 16 September from 3 to 5pm!
CHUG was happy to be asked to host this beautiful floating forest and glade during the 2011 summer. The huge amount of effort and creativity behind the project came from the inspirational Kindest Group. Passers-by were invited to take a ride on the floating glade, along the canal a little way, until it reached the floating forest. Whilst falling for the calming charms of the water, and relaxing beneath the impressive plywood tree, people were offered a wooden symbol on a ribbon. Each symbol had a meaning to get them started, and forest passengers were asked to interpret each other’s symbols, before putting it around their necks and stepping back onto the towpath and into the real world. TimeOut blogged about the project, and Wired wrote about it too.
