organic

Six Community-focused growing projects came together for the first Strong Roots training day in late May (2010) to explore ways of making their food growing projects more sustainable and meet others who share their passion for their communities and are facing similar challenges & opportunities.

Groups who attended included Friends of Platt Fields Park, Manchester Methodist Housing Group, Victoria House (a homeless project), Crumpsall & Cheetham Model Allotment as well as Children and Families Services in Wythensawe.Read more

Growing Manchester is a new programme to support community growing projects in the city to become more sustainable in the long term and covers a wide range of issues such as maintaining soil fertility, your legal responsibilities, micro-trading and involving more people. The Programme offers a unique package of support including:Read more

As part of the FeedingManchester events we have collectively been working on a definition of sustainable food. This is to ensure that future action to green Manchester addresses our unsustainable food system, as well as being the foundation for the growing sustainable food movement in Greater Manchester.Read more

Kindling's Chris Walsh gave a presentation to several hundred Manchester School of Architecture students on the issue of sustainable food in Manchester in mid-November 2009. As part of the students’ first year project they are exploring urban food production and consumption and the talk raised the many and interlinked problems with our present unsustainable food system and offered some potential solutions.Read more

On Valentine’s Day 2009, Kindling launched its pocket-sized seasonal food calendar "The time is ripe", produced with the support of the Local Food Fund. The booklet and accompanying website aims to make the process of shopping for locally produced, seasonal fruit and vegetables easier. Alongside the seasonal food calendar are details of where to buy local, seasonal produce in Manchester as well as tips on selection and storage.Read more

We were very pleased to host Vicki Cooke, Seed Officer at the Heritage Seed Library, for seed saving workshops at allotment sites in both Levenshulme and Old Trafford.

The two workshops involved over twenty allotment holders and introduced the benefits of saving seeds from your successful plants, the basics of pollination and how different plants are pollinated in different ways and finally how to harvest suitable seeds.

For further information visit the seed saving gallery.