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Category Archives: community

St Piran’s Day Celebrations in Redruth

It’s been a fun packed day in sunshine today, the parade, markets, daffodils, live music, flowers everywhere and so many happy, smiley people. Enjoy the gallery.

Outside the GrowBox

The parade

The Lamb

Steam punk

Our flag

Redruth School

Steam punk

Perran Moon, our MP, having a chat

On Bond Street

For those who wonder about the lamb:

Redruth Town Council uses The Lamb and Flag as its emblem building on a heritage of use in the town for hundreds of years though its origin remains widely debated. Historians believe the symbol first appeared in the wool trade during the Middle Ages. By the 19th century, people associated a lamb with purity due to its Christian connotations and used it in the mining trade to indicate the purity of the metal they were producing – the smelters stamped each ingot with the sign of the lamb and the St Piran flag was added to indicate its Cornish origin. Both copper and tin were very important in Cornwall, with various mines in the Redruth, Pool and Camborne area being the largest in the world for each of these minerals.

4 Comments

Posted by mybeautfulthings on March 7, 2026 in Celebration, community, Cornwall, craft, flowers, Happiness, Postaday 2026, Redruth

Tags: The Lamb and Flag

St Piran’s Day, Choir Baby and A Pasty

05 Mar

Today after choir, we sang Harry Glasson’s Cornwall My Home in the courtyard to celebrate St Piran’s Day Here it is now, especially for my sister in Hawaii.

We have another Choir-Baby after many years of none and we are all delighted to have one year old S with us and clearly enjoying the singing.

After the courtyard singing

We had pasties for lunch to mark the day but I was enjoying it so much I forgot to take a photo until it was almost all gone.

It’s also World Book Day so happy days to all you readers and to all those who have dressed up for the day, especially LiveWire 3 who at almost 15 years old has gone to school as a very beautiful and tortured Lady Macbeth.

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Posted by mybeautfulthings on March 5, 2026 in Celebration, Choir-baby, community, Cornwall, family, Food, music, Postaday 2026, singing

Tags: Harry Glasson

Happiness Calendar, Community Roots and St David’s Day

01 Mar

Today the allotment is no longer ours but our fellow allotmenteers from the last few years came to visit Community Roots to hear about no-dig and to learn all about the garden. It was a very damp and fascinating morning which was greatly enjoyed by everyone. Here are some of them after the tour and after having worked in the new orchard.

It’s St David’s Day and here are more daffodils to honour my Welsh heritage. My Mum’s father was Welsh. They really were nodding in the breeze and the rain as I took the video through the window.

Sewing, The AGM and Reading

25 Feb

I’ve been curtain making today using some wonderful vintage Laura Ashley fabric from 1983. It’s fabric which we used for kitchen curtains in our penultimate home before moving back to Cornwall so it is full of lovely memories of our children growing up, family dinners and birthday teas in that kitchen. I’ll show the curtain in place when it’s hung..

This evening was the AGM for Community Roots which was full of information of what we have all achieved and what we will be aiming for over the next year. One of our directors is leaving and we were all asked to give one word to describe her. As you can see, she is much loved and will be greatly missed. She is the essence of Roots.

I spent the afternoon reading the latest book from The ShelterBox book Club. It’s both harrowing and full of love and hope. I’ll tell you more when I’ve finished it.

Crocuses, Tomatoes and Ukraine

24 Feb

My Suffragette garden is coming into bloom, purple, white and green crocus plants.

You may remember that last week we sowed many trays of tomatoes of various sorts. Today they were up and ready for transplanting and I was so busy doing that I forgot to take any photos. The following photo of Gardeners’ Ecstasy is from the internet, not mine!

We send our love to our friends in Ukraine as the war reaches a 4th anniversary. We remember with great fondness the friends we made among the Hooligan Art Community. Here are some photos from 2023 when they were visiting.

Slava Ukraine!

2 Comments

Posted by mybeautfulthings on February 24, 2026 in community, Cornwall, environment, friendship, garden, nature, Postaday 2026

Tags: Hooligan Art Community, Slava Ukraini

All About Primroses

20 Feb

I love primroses as I think I may have mentioned before, so when I saw a sensory herbalism course featuring the primrose, I knew where. I had to be this morning.

It was a delightful morning, gentle and life affirming to be in the company of like-minded others, to learn about the primrose, to draw, to find words, to really ‘see’ the flowers, leaves, structure and special qualities of the primrose, to discover its healing properties and to drink delicately delicious primrose tea. The sense of calm I left with has lasted all day.

Beautiful plant card artwork by Fiona Owen

Thanks, F, a brilliant morning.

6 Comments

Posted by mybeautfulthings on February 20, 2026 in community, environment, nature, Postaday 2026, senses, Uncategorized

Tags: community roots, The Big Shed

Potatoes, Primroses and Pancakes

17 Feb

There was a bitterly cold wind up at Roots today but the hardiest of the volunteers planted all the potatoes. A less hardy group of us planted tomato, aubergine, pepper, fennel and celery seeds. Others were transplanting the baby onion plants from seed trays into modules.

Amy among the rows of potatoes

There are more beautiful primroses in our front garden.

It’s Shrove Tuesday and this evening we’ve had savoury pancakes stuffed with ham and sweet corn followed by crêpes suzettes with the juice of ruby red blood oranges.

5 Comments

Posted by mybeautfulthings on February 17, 2026 in community, Cornwall, environment, Food, nature, Postaday 2026, Uncategorized, volunteering

Tags: community roots

Allotment, Leeks and A Good Read

13 Feb

We’ve had lots of fun and lots of delicious food from our allotment over the years but the time has come to move on. We have four raised beds for veg in our garden and can get fresh veg from Community Roots so at the end of the month we will hand over the plot to a lovely and very enthusiastic young family.
This morning we dug up a lot of our leeks and have spent the day processing them all. At £1 each from the shops, they are a very valuable crop! We now have some pots of leeks in white sauce as a ‘ready’ veg, prepped leeks for the base of a risotto and four bottles of leek and potato soup – a very productive and pretty tiring day.

The current book from The ShelterBox Book Group is ‘Scattered’ by Aamna Modhin. This is a powerful and gripping story told by a journalist who visited Calais as she was reporting on the refugee crisis and here begins to come to terms with being a refugee herself. It is a wonderful mix of personal history and journalistic detail, all told in a very readable style. I really cared about Aamna and her family and I learned a great deal about the whole refugee situation which the media doesn’t really show. There’s an excellent glossary, notes section and bibliography. It seems a perfect choice for the ShelterBox book group and I’m looking forward to the Q&A with the author next week.

6 Comments

Posted by mybeautfulthings on February 13, 2026 in community, growing, History, Postaday 2026, Uncategorized

Tags: Aamna Modhin, Kakuma Refugee Camp, Somalia

Seedlings, Ingenuity and A Mantra

10 Feb

We have hundreds of onion seedlings at Roots and they will be ready for transplanting next week.

Today we transplanted 200+ baby lettuce and pak choi plants and they are now in one of the big poly tunnels as there is no room in the smaller prop tunnel where the propagating takes place. The ingenuity comes in the suspended racks to create more room for the baby plants.

We are ten days into February so it’s a bit late to share this month’s mantra from The 2026 Almanac but I like it so here it is:

2 Comments

Posted by mybeautfulthings on February 10, 2026 in community, Cornwall, environment, growing, nature, Postaday 2026

Tags: community roots, Lia Leendertz

Tree Planting, Singing, Community

08 Feb

What a wonderful day as two of my communities came together, The Roots gang to plant an orchard and the Ingleheart Singers to entertain the crowd and then to sing Wassail to welcome the trees to their new home! Enjoy the gallery. Click on any photo for a bigger version and the caption.

Early instructions from Matty

Fruit trees will go where the blue squares are markedAll setting off to find a place to dig

Setting off to choose a spot

Us digging a hole for our tree

Busy diggers

Our plum tree is in. Now to go home to change ready to sing this afternoon.

As we leave, there’s a rainbow!

Choir singing the Newdigate Wassail

Trees all in and mulched.

Children giving bread and cider to the trees

Reasons for Offering Bread/Toast:

Symbolic Offering: The toast represents a gift to the spirits inhabiting the orchard, specifically the “Apple Tree Man” or tree spirits, ensuring they are well-fed and inclined to bring a good harvest.
Attracting Guardians: The bread attracts robins, which were historically considered guardian spirits of the orchard.
Fertility Ritual: The act is part of a wider fertility ritual that includes pouring cider on the roots and making noise to wake the trees from hibernation.
Representing Abundance: The bread symbolizes the previous year’s harvest and acts as a pledge for a fruitful return in the following autumn.