Join Hearing Dogs heroes’ plant sale  

Liz Nicholls

Long-standing Hearing Dogs volunteers Fiona and Rob Daniels will welcome you at the charity plant and cake sale at The Grange in Saunderton on Saturday, 6th April  

Fiona and Rob Daniels started welcoming visitors during lockdown in 2020 and since then they’ve raised £100,000 for Hearing Dogs. 

Fiona explains: “We used to take plants we’d grown into The Grange and sell them at Hearing Dogs volunteer coffee afternoons. They seemed quite popular, so we continued planting and growing seedlings ready for the next sales. 

“When Covid hit, we had all these spare plants that we couldn’t take to The Grange, so we set up a table outside our house. We made over £200 that weekend.” 

Spurred on by this success, Fiona and Rob began holding sales more frequently. “On VE Day, we joined forces with our fellow volunteers, Peter Shepperd and Wendy Baldwin. This time we also sold cakes, and we were stunned to have people queueing around the corner of our road. That raised £900! After that, we began making chutneys and preserves from fruit and veg we’d grown and Peter made his famous pasties and chilli sauces. We hold sales between March and October every year and started holding them at The Grange in 2021 as well, to enable more people to come.” 

Tasha Stones, semi-finalist in the latest series of the Great British Bake Off, paid a visit to a plant, cake and preserve sale last year. Tasha, who stole viewers hearts as the programme’s first ever deaf contestant, visited the sale with her mum, bringing with her some of her show-stopping bakes, raspberry brownies, which were given away on the day as one of the raffle prizes. 

Tasha was born hearing, but was profoundly deaf by the time she was nine months old. She has a cochlear implant and communicates with both speech and British Sign Language. She is now the proud parent of her own hearing dog Digby.