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Last night we held our annual 'Do you want to be an organic farmer?' event at Woodbank Community Food Hub, where we welcomed eight keen folk to learn more about the FarmStart course before they apply. It was a great evening with lots of really interesting discussion, and great potential for our next set of recruits.

Last Saturday we welcomed over 80 of our new members of Kindling Farm to Woodbank Community Food Hub for an exciting open day.

We gave them tours of the site, explaining the similarities that we'll be seeing on the farm in the future, and they were able to enjoy some delicious home cooked soup and stew from our fantastic volunteers. We had a veg stall filled with all our produce grown by the excellent team of community gardeners, and a cake stall that people flocked to in between tours.

Our annual 'Do you want to be an organic farmer?' event is back this year at Woodbank Community Food Hub on the 6th October. This event is specifically for those interested in becoming an organic grower, to find out more about our exciting FarmStart programme and learn about what it's like to be a commercial grower.

It’s been just over a month since our community shares campaign to help buy Kindling Farm finished - and we’ve been busy ever since! Here’s a quick update to keep you all in the loop about the next steps for the Farm, and how you can get involved.

We’re at a really exciting time in our journey at Woodbank, as we look to expand our site to be even more productive, as well as offering more fantastic events and volunteering opportunities to you, our community. We are lucky enough to be in a position to be able to offer some new roles based at Woodbank, and are looking for some enthusiastic and talented people to fill them.

Our sister organisation, Veg Box People, are looking to recruit a passionate and hardworking person to join them for 30 hours a week, and help to grow Manchester’s food revolution.

The role itself will include lots of different jobs, from meeting the farmers and growers of the produce, to helping to pack the bags with the team, delivering them to the collection points, and helping out with general admin tasks.

There is one week left until our community share offer to help us buy Kindling Farm ends! You can invest anything from £200 up until the 3rd July.

We’re aware we haven’t written a Kindling Farm update for a while. It’s been a busy few months and, to be honest, a bit of a roller coaster ride since we last wrote. 

As grafting season comes to a close, and all our newly grafted apple trees are planted out at our site in Glazebury, hear from Dan, one of the amazing agroforestry team members, about his journey into grafting and his ambitions to become the next best budder in town!

We have officially restarted our regular market stall at Woodbank Community Food Hub. For three weeks running now we have sold spinach, spring onions, leeks, dried rosemary, chutney, potted plants and more, all from the site itself (or made with produce from there). The veg is harvested in the morning by our wellbeing group, and is almost all gone by the end of the day. These stalls help us to raise funds for the food hub, so we can continue to grow organic veg and provide a space for people to socialise and learn valuable skills.