Incredible Egerton

Incredible Egerton

Incredible Egerton is an open access drop-in group for lovers of all things nature, whether new to gardening or with a lifetime of green fingers. The group has no membership requirements beyond a degree of enthusiasm for gardening, and a willingness to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in.

We began in 2012 as Incredible Edible Bromley Cross (IEBX), ‘guerrilla gardening’ on a number of vacant garden plots in the Bromley Cross area. In 2015 we were invited to put our roots down at Walmsley Unitarian Chapel gardens, which is now our permanent home.

Come along and join us on Friday mornings from 10.30am, whatever your skills, we sincerely welcome everyone. Whether you’re a gardener, an enthusiastic ‘Do It Yourself-er’ (we have lots of repair and improvement jobs around the place!) or you fancy a ‘work-out’ in the cafe (we have lots of roles there and they don’t all involve cooking!) you will be very welcome.

Nature Café – our Friday Community Café

As a way of sharing our bountiful harvests and the fruits of our labour, we established the Nature Cafe, a weekly community cafe providing a range of home-cooked meals at reasonable prices. Nature Cafe is a registered food business which regularly attracts around 40 visitors each Friday, including weekly regulars and those visiting us for the first time, the perfect refuelling spot for walkers and cyclists.

Income made from the Nature Cafe is used to support the group’s activities and to make donations both to the Chapel and to a number of other local charities. Some of the charities we have helped in recent years include Bolton Hospice, Urban Outreach, Fort Alice, The Salvation Army, Emmaus, Derian House, Shelter and Macmillan Cancer Support. Between September 2022 and February 2023, the Nature Café users donated over £3,600 to local charities, the Ukrainian Crisis appeal and the Turkey-Syria earthquake appeal.

Incredible Unitarian Garden

Our garden is a place of beauty, peace, creativity and joy. Here we have raised beds where we grow fruit and vegetables for the Nature Cafe, areas to sit and enjoy a chat or simply contemplate the beauty that surrounds us. The ‘Secret Garden’ is a lovely oasis of calm. All around, there are beautiful, scented flower and herb beds, fruit bushes and trees: a fabulous place to sit or to wander around.

We grow and share. Individual members of Incredible Egerton can ‘adopt’ a raised bed to grow vegetables and flowers. The ethos of the Incredible Edible movement is to grow and share. We do this in the Unitarian Garden by sharing produce and flowers with the Nature Café and fellow gardeners. We’ve had good harvests of carrots, onions, potatoes, lettuce, leeks, apples, rhubarb, herbs and flowers. We are constantly working to improve the garden and its facilities and welcome anyone who would like to have a small garden plot and be part of an active group.

Nature Child

This is a weekly baby and toddler group that really appreciates the opportunity to ‘spill out’ into the beautiful and safe, enclosed garden area. These sessions run on Mondays during term time, from 9.30am – 12 noon.