Hopefully, many of you have visited the wonderful statue of Arsène Wenger. Whilst paying homage to our legendary former manager, hopefully you we able to enjoy the garden that we have also created as part of the project.
This small but perfectly formed area has several benefits. Firstly, the introduction of plants to an otherwise mainly grey urban area can help bring additional and essential wildlife to our home.
Green spaces also have well documented benefits on mental wellbeing as well as simply improving the aesthetics of an area. For the gardeners out there, you may well have spotted examples of Hydrangea, Nandina and the beautiful Photinia Red Robin. For those of you who aren’t, we hope you enjoy the colourful plants.
But there is a lot more to this story. The panels that form the beds are made of recycled material, and not just any recycled material. A legacy from the awful COVID restrictions, the bags used to restrict access to seats and keep us apart within Emirates Stadium have been turned into something that will hopefully bring us together. Not only are the panels made from recycled material, but the compost used to house the new plants is made from Emirates Stadium food waste.
Busy in Bore!
There's lots going on in Bore, the area of coastal Kenya where we are growing the Arsenal Forest – which now totals over 28,000 trees.
Nursery tales
The nursery where the saplings are being nurtured has been extremely busy recently as the funding from Arsenal and other projects - allied to perfect growing conditions – has seen the propagation capacity go up from one million seedlings to 1.25m. Preparations look extremely positive for the upcoming planting season.
A-maizing!
The new project to support the Bore Lionesses football team – who have been fully kitted out by Arsenal – in setting up a small co-operative trading business in the local village of Bore Singwaya is now well underway and it's already becoming a nice sideline earner for the whole team. They take it in turns to staff the business and pictured is Alice Khadija Hare on duty, with the newly purchased scales that are used for weighing out the maize meal and other groceries in the shop. Alice is an athletic right winger for the Lionesses.
School support
Because its been so consistently wet over in Bore, the nursery has been able to continue distributing trees to schools and farmers on an almost ongoing basis, rather than in the normal two seasonal tranches. As we've mentioned before, the schools are all very keen to have neem trees as it's the variety we grow in the Arsenal Forest – so much so that it has now become known as 'the Arsenal tree' in the region and its popularity has rocketed.
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