Four Seasons of Sustainability on Campus: Our Sustainable Garden
Since 2015, the Sustainable Garden has provided a space at the heart of campus for staff, students and visitors to enjoy quiet contemplation as well as contribute to growing edible crops.
In 2024, Caroline Scott, “The Edible Gardener”, Incredible Edible Leeds and the Sustainability Service joined together to enhance and maintain the garden as an edible and wildlife-friendly space.
Weekly gardening sessions are held throughout the year, allowing members of the university and local communities to learn and connect. This year’s activities were supported by Student Sustainability Architect Rosie Shaw who contributed to garden management, planning and coached volunteers to develop their gardening skills. The garden also supports skills development and remains an active Living Lab for education and research.
With the 2025-26 academic year having come to a close, we thought this would be a good time to look back at what has been achieved in the garden over the past year...
Summer 2025
Prior to the start of the academic year, we had a busy & bustling summer in the Sustainable Garden. Plenty of vegetables were harvested by our volunteers, including beetroot, peas and potatoes to take home, and autumn seeds were sown and watered for the colder months ahead.
Whilst taking a break from the warm weather, volunteers enjoyed garden-made herbal teas, and sweet treats in the form of loganberries, Japanese wine berries, mulberries and wild strawberries. Some volunteers even ventured beyond the garden to St George’s Field, collecting blackcurrants which were later made into homemade jam!
We closed our final session of summer with a celebration event for our brilliant volunteers and all the hard work they put in throughout the year prior.
September 2025
As the start of the academic year rolled around, it was fantastic to see so many new and returning faces in the Sustainable Garden. Around Welcome Week, we welcomed over 30 volunteers across 3 sessions, with even more potatoes harvested, and incorporated into our volunteers’ meals!
October 2025 – January 2026
The rest of autumn came with plenty of exciting activities, as well as some more mundane ones. Our volunteers replanted the garden’s willow arch and weaved in some new branches, tidied the garden by putting new woodchip on the paths, and used fallen autumn leaves from across campus to mulch the garden’s fruit bushes.
The remaining seasonal veggies were also harvested from the garden before the winter break, including leeks, broccoli, celery, bulb fennel, chard, chickweed, nettle tops and winter salads.
With some less-than-optimal gardening weather leading into the winter break, our final December session went indoors, and some of our volunteers tried their hand at making festive wreaths from foraged holly, fuchsia and ivy.
Left to Right: Photos from our July, September, November and December 2025 Sustainable Garden sessions.
February 2026
January was a quieter month in the garden, but February injected a new lease of life, with two fantastic “Give-it-a-Go" sessions, where we welcomed over 50 total volunteers to kick off semester 2.
Across these two sessions, our volunteers sowed spring onions, leeks and more with recycled milk jugs, re-potted some herbs and harvested some of our winter crops, including purslane, cabbage and kale.
March & April 2026
Weekly sessions restarted in March, and some new infrastructure and maintenance was needed across the garden. Across March and April, our volunteers built new fencing and rabbit-proofed the forest garden beds, did plenty of weeding, watering & mulching, whilst harvesting and planting plenty more crops. In addition, a new fig and apple tree were also planted!
May 2026
May was a busy month for the garden on multiple fronts. Our volunteers harvested lots of produce planted earlier in the year, including rhubarb, chives, spring onion, chard, broccoli and plenty more, and planted courgettes and beans in our vegetable beds.
In addition, we also held a wild pesto-making session using wild garlic, nettles and other garden ingredients, and ran a wellbeing-focused gardening session during Mental Health Awareness Week, even with the rainy weather!
June 2026
Despite many of our student volunteers finishing their exams and assignments, we had an amazing group getting stuck into all kinds of tasks during June, despite the weather varying from pouring rain to heatwave.
Our volunteers harvested garlic bulbs, salad leaves and peas and planted sunflowers, more courgettes, tomatoes and dwarf beans. Additionally, they made homemade nettle tea fertiliser, which was used to water the garden’s beds, and constructed a windbreak to protect the newly planted tomato plants.
Whilst the 2025-26 academic year has now come to its conclusion, our weekly Sustainable Garden sessions will continue throughout summer!
Left to Right: Photos from our February, March, May and June 2026 Sustainable Garden sessions.
Thank you to our volunteers
The successes of the past 12 months wouldn’t have been possible without our volunteers who together contributed more than 500 hours to improve our campus environment, promote biodiversity and make community-grown food accessible to all.
Anyone can join our Wednesday volunteer sessions, or if you have other ideas on engaging with the Sustainable Garden, get in touch which us at [email protected]
We use the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework to guide our activity. Our work on the Sustainable Garden is linked to the following SDGs:
- Goal 2: Zero Hunger
- Goal 3: Good Health and Wellbeing
- Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
- Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production
- Goal 15: Life on Land
- Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals
Find out more about our impact on the SDGs.