Green Hive Starter kit

Happy Earth Day! As a local charity focusing on the community and enviroment, we want to do our bit to help you connect to people safely and enjoy fun activities with an enviromental focus. Thanks to the flexible support provided by the National Lottery Community Fund we are pleased to be able to show you all what we have been working on:

Introducing the Green Hive Starter Kit

Earth day is the perfect day to make a choice to live more sustainably – join us to make 2020 the year for championing creativity and positivity in the face of adversity. Whether you are a seasoned participant to Green Hive or you are new to us and what we do, our starter kit project provides ways for you to keep in touch with the Nairn community and some fantastic activities to help get you started on a greener life!

An overview of our new Starter Kit!

The Mental Health Foundation has found that a quarter of people in Scotland are feeling lonely due to the pandemic (source – https://thirdforcenews.org.uk/tfn-news/loneliness-doubles-during-coronavirus-lockdown) Our Starter Kit project has been designed to help combat social isolation and bring our well-loved events and activities into your home – The project is split into two streams – physical activity kits to keep you busy and learning new skills, and digital meet-ups and webinars so you can connect with friends and find out about local enviromental issues that matter to you. The National Lottery Community Fund has provided funding for the first 60 kits – you can register your interest on the form at the bottom of this page.

Starter Kits

We have transformed our existing activities into packs that you can work on from home –

Grow your own

We want you to enjoy springtime as much as we do, we can provide you with seeds, compost and plant pots so you can start growing your own vegetables and plants at home – we are also offering rental of our gardening equipment – there’s never been a better time to get your green thumb into action!

Litter Picks

Have you spotted litter pollution on your daily exercise? We can provide you with a litter picking kit to help tackle local litter hotspots, as well as a litter survey to help us figure out the main areas of pollution to target for our big public litter picks after the lockdown.

Wax wraps

Our wax wrap kit provides you with a sustainable alternative to cling film and plastic packaging for all your home baked produce – our kit will contain fabric, vegan wax and instructions on making your own wraps from home

Bumblebags

We are offering a Bumblebag starter kit including fabric, thread and instructions on making your own tote bags and other textile creations. We can offer you a sewing machine to borrow as well!

Plastic identification toolkit

Your plastic donations have helped us create a wonderful array of clocks at our Green Hive workshop -we have created a kit to help you identify your plastic waste at home, as well as some simple ideas for recycling your plastic into useful items before they go into your blue bin.

Webinars

Working with our partners across the Highlands, we have formed a program of webinars which will be available to all online, covering topics such as; Marine Plastics – the impact of plastic pollution on our local marine habitats Getting into growing – how to start growing your own fruits and vegetables at home Identifying Invasive Species – what are invasive species and how can we manage them? Maintaining your fruit trees – Make sure your trees get the best care possible Foraging for food – Let’s find out about foraging in our local green spaces

Meeting up

One of the hardest trials of lockdown for us was losing the ability to meet up with our fantastic volunteers – Green Hive thrives on community involvement and it’s been very tough not being able to see you all! Using the internet, video platform apps and social media – we want to connect with you during lockdown with our new digital meet-ups – We want to bring our Natter online with a Green Hive Jam – a natter with a singsong, poetry or storytime. Come and share your tips and tricks on sustainable living at our Green Living meet up -do you have advice on recycling to share? Maybe you have a project to transform waste in your house into useful items, or maybe you would like to find out more about how to start cutting down on waste and save some money too! And finally, enjoy our green spaces in spring with our Green Space virtual tour a live video tour of areas such as Nairn river, Nairn’s beaches, the community orchard, and many more!

Nairn beach looking beautiful in Spring – Neil Mapes

Sign me up!

We hope you like our plans for our starter kit project, it is a privilege for us to continue to serve the Nairn community during this period. Let us know what kits you are interested in with this expression of interest form at the bottom of this page, or here If you have any questions, or would like to volunteer in the starter kit project – helping either with creation or distribution of starter kits, donating equipment or materials, or facilitating a digital session – please contact caroline@greenhive.co.uk