This Saturday (May 31) sees the first ever Kendal-in-Bloom coffee morning. Those of you who have followed my Blog so far will have all ready seen me mention it.

I thought today I would explain just what Kendal-in-Bloom actually is.

Each year the Town and Town signs blossom into full floral display; this is one of the roles the Town Council has taken on. (With lots of hard work and dedication from the Town’s handy man Mike Mason) The reason behind this is to help make Kendal a beautiful place to live and work for its residents, giving pride in the Town we live enjoying seeing it look so fine. This in turn also makes Kendal a more attractive place to visit, encouraging visitors to have a good feel about our Town and hopefully passing on their thoughts to others which is a great help to the economics of the Town.

Each year the Town Council, led by a working group, made up of Town Councillors and members of the public, with an interest in Bloom. Run a competition to encourage residents to get involved in helping us make our community an attractive place to live.

This competition encourages people to nominate their own or others floral displays from hanging baskets, troughs, front gardens, public buildings, hidden gardens window boxes to name just a few! You may pass a lovely display whilst travelling to work each day and like to nominate it, you don’t have to know the person if others enjoy looking at it, enter it in.

Nomination forms can be found around the Town, Town council office, SLDC reception in Angel Yard, TIC. You don’t even have to have a nomination form; you could just ring it through to the Town Council office (717496).

In the last two years we have won the Cumbria in Bloom large Town, an achievement to be very proud of. Last year Cumbria in Bloom entered us into the Britain in Bloom Large Town category , we were quite taken aback, not expecting to win a prize just honoured to have been noticed and entered. We maintained our original remit as above, focusing on trying to encourage our communities to become involved, thus helping us to show off our beautiful town. We won a Silver guilt award which came as a very pleasant surprise to us all, well done to all those people who helped achieve this.

This year we want to involve more residents than ever, we have Castle Walk residents putting up hanging baskets the young people on Rinkfield planting an area, primary schools planting pots, secondary schools painting and litter picking to name a few. We have been trying to get our business community to become involved, giving a little back to the Town by sponsoring displays, helping the Town Council improve on what we can offer with our limited funds but all in all giving us pride in our Towns appearance.

So to the coffee morning, (if you are still reading!) we have decided to hold a coffee morning in the Town Hall- Bindloss room on Saturday morning 9am to 12 noon to try to raise additional funds to help pay towards floral displays.

I will be serving teas and coffee, Sasha my little girl will help with the biscuits! And lots of other Town Councillors will be helping too.

Come along and spend some money to help!