The Wash House Garden

Project: Bee Club 2025

Idea in a Nutshell

The Wash House Garden will continue to develop the Beekeeping activities that they started with the help of GCFN’s first peer budgeting grant in 2023. They have run their Bee Club successfully over the last two years with a huge interest from the community. Bee Club is always their most in-demand session, with a big waiting list, and they have received amazing feedback from participants who have told them that they would like the opportunity to volunteer with the bees more often than once a month and that they want to be more involved in the day-to-day caretaking of the bees. Because of this feedback and the general high interest in accessible free Beekeeping activities, The Wash House Garden would like to run:

3 x Introduction to Beekeeping workshops in May and June. These workshops will be open to anyone but we will focus on promoting them to local people in the East End of Glasgow who do not have access to Beekeeping facilities or courses otherwise. We can accommodate 7 participants per session, 21 participants in total.
Weekly Beekeeping volunteer sessions between May and September (20 sessions in total). These sessions will be for a closed group. They will be open to previous Bee Club members from the last two years and anyone who has attended one of the Intro to Beekeeping sessions. Rather than teaching, these sessions are more focussed on hands-on volunteering with the bees. The sessions will be open to 5 volunteers each week on a first-come-first-serve basis.

With this session structure, The Wash House Garden's aim is to increase the opportunities to volunteer with the bees while also keeping in mind the limited capacity they have in terms of how many people can interact with the bees per session due to the amount of space and PPE available, how much the bees can be handled without causing damage to them and our capacity as a team at the garden juggling several other strands of delivery and a veg box scheme. Through the Introduction sessions, they are hoping they can open up the volunteering to 21 additional people throughout the season.

Experience

We are a Workers Co-operative of Queer Community Growers, stewarding a beautiful piece of land in East Glasgow. We seek to actively contribute to the struggles for food sovereignty and land justice in Glasgow, Scotland and beyond.

Since 2018 we have been farming a secluded half of an acre tucked away behind the old Parkhead Wash House. This building was once a focal point for the local area and we mirror this by placing community at the heart of what we do. As a family of staff and volunteers we:

Grow fruit and vegetables for 30 households and a few food businesses each week from Spring through Autumn, using agroecological, no-dig methods to ensure our ecosystem (including the people) is as healthy as possible.
Run regular volunteer sessions for anyone interested in learning more about growing food and connecting with others, particularly aiming to create a safe space for people from the LGBTQ+ community to facilitate access to land-based skills for this community.
Run workshops on food growing, beekeeping and other outdoor crafts for local organisations, schools, nurseries and the general public. We do these at the garden and throughout the city.
Put on free community meals and events at the garden and offer the garden as a space for local groups to meet and organise.
Rent out our outdoor event and workshop space, The Canopy, which includes fire pits and a pizza oven.
Offer our services as community and market gardening consultants.