Manchester Veg People are jubilant as their Crowdfunding campaign to 'Get the Manchester Food Revolution moving’ exceeds it £16,000 target! This very modern form of fund-raising utilised a huge twitter campaign; mobilised weblogger and celebrity chefs to help spread the word over six weeks. The result: over 300 people from across the UK made pledges from £5 up to a thousand pounds.
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Please help Manchester Veg People's CrowdFunding Campaign to raise funds to buy a van.
Manchester Veg People is a co-operative of local organic growers and buyers who are growing sustainable veg, distributing it and serving it up in pubs, restaurants and canteens across Greater Manchester. You will find their veg in both public sector canteens, (and in the near future in local schools) as well as in prestigious restaurants and bars such as Common, Aumbry, The Parlour, The Beagle and Chorlton Green Brasserie.
During May we partnered up with Open Data Manchester and Everyday Growing Cultures to carry out a pilot mapping project in Old Trafford. The aim of the project was to produce a website with a toolkit to guide communities throughout the country to carry out their own mapping initiative with a goal of identifying unused plots of land for food growing.
The idea came after discovering a website in new York called 596acres.org, which mapped the vacant lots in Brooklyn, which totalled 596 acres.
Our most recent Land Army trip on Thursday 24th May took us once again to Glebelands in Sale, where we worked alongside the growers Alan, Charlotte and Adam – and Susie the dog!
We undertook a variety of jobs, starting off with preparing the beds in the polytunnel where the basil is to be planted later this week. We began by digging out the dreaded horsetail, or ‘Devil’s Finger’ as it was known to one of our volunteers, and weeding the borders.
Our latest project, FarmStart has started, with 6 people signed up for ¼ acre plots to start their vegetable growing businesses.
The land is rented from Abbey Leys Farm, an organic egg and cereals farm on the M56 to the south-west of Manchester.
We had a really successful mapping event last night (1st May) in Old Trafford. A dozen people: local residents, community gardeners and academics helped us map potential food growing spaces around St Johns Church on Ayres Road.
It was a glorious sunny evening, so we tried to keep the time we spend in front of computers to a minimum.
Kindling gave a quick presentation on the potential of urban food growing, offering examples of growing techniques and thus land, containers, walls etc. which can be utilised to grow food.
We are running a course to help groups creating more sustainable community food growing projects.
Following the enthusiastic response to our commercial vegetable growing courses, from the community food growing sector, we asked the lead trainer, Jenny Griggs of Firtree Community Growers, if she would be willing to create a similar course but tailored to community food growing projects.
We are working with the Everyday Growing Cultures project and Open Data Manchester to run two mapping workshops in Old Trafford, looking for land which is suitable for growing fruit and vegetables.
If you would like to see a greener and more productive Old Trafford and would like to learn how to use technology to make it happen, join us!
We will run a workshop on the opportunities for growing veg in urban areas. We will then be walking the streets & identifying spaces - collating the data and uploading onto a map.
On Wednesday 17th of April we will be taking a group of volunteers out to Moss Brook Growers to help prepare for the new growing season.
The changeable and unpredictable weather we had last year, and the cold spell we're having now, means there's even more work than normal for growers to do to get ready for this season, so come and muck in!
We are looking for people to fill two part-time employment opportunities here at Kindling and join our little team.
Do you have a passion for social justice, sustainability, co-operation and enterprising ways of working?
Do you want to help raise our profile as part of our work to encourage people to live in more ecologically and socially responsible ways? Or use your knowledge and experience of financial systems to support us to become more efficient in our work on these issues?