Peebles youngsters embrace the environment in new gardening scheme

• Report by Jennifer Cordingley

A community garden near Peebles has been teaching young children about sustainability and growing their own food. 

Newlands Nursery received funding from Edinburgh University to help them engage the youngsters to embrace environmental activities.Pippa Lobban, a Newlands community gardener, said, "We're really concentrating on sustainability right now, especially with COP26. We've been doing activities like composting, water saving, learning where our food comes from, trying to cut down our food miles, using peat free compost. They're going to be the ones having to tackle climate change in the future so hopefully they will learn to love nature and respect it and hopefully all these actions are doing that.

"Pulling a carrot out of the ground and being like, why is there a carrot under there? What is it doing hiding in the ground? You see it in the shops but pulling it out of the ground is really important. We need to eat more local food and learn how to produce it, it's such an important skill. So if you've grown it yourself you're more likely to eat all of it up because you've known how long it takes to grow it and nurture it."

The centre hopes to get local people from the wider community involved in the Newlands Grow Your Own project.