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On the evening of 29th August 2012  representatives of community gardens from across Greater Manchester came together for a training session on how to run a community garden open day.

On Saturday 15th September the UK’s largest Edible Gardens event will offer a glimpse of urban food growing in Greater Manchester, with sixteen gardens opening their gates to the public.

Many of the participating community food gardens will be putting on activities such as garden tours, talks, games and barbecues, as well as selling garden produce and home made food.

Make the most of an amazing training opportunity to learn how to set up an organic food growing business from the growers themselves this Autumn. We have a growing market for organic local food, an amazing network of support and training straight from the field – what's stopping you?!

We are in the unusual position in Greater Manchester, of having a market for local organic produce that actually pays the cost of production, not the volatile market prices! But we need more crops, and therefore more organic commercial growers local to Greater Manchester.

Allotments and community food-growing gardens in Greater Manchester will open their gates to the public during September 2012, in the largest open event of food-growing spaces ever seen in the UK.  Local gardeners and growers are gearing up for The Edible Gardens Open Day, which takes place on Saturday 15th September, providing members of the public with a glimpse of the green spaces on their doorstep.

We here at Kindling love what Manchester Abundance do and over the years we have had the pleasure of working with them on a number of projects.

Abundance Manchester.
Since 2008 Abundance Manchester has been harvesting unwanted fruit and veg from gardens and allotments in the south of the city. It is distributed, often in bike trailers, to projects that can make good use of it. Since 2010 the group has also looked after the 15 year-old Kenworthy Community Orchard in Chorlton.

March's FeedingManchester #9 focussed on growing and developing FeedingManchester by engaging with and recieving feedback from individuals and groups located around Greater Manchester as part of the sustainable food movement.  

Attendees ranged from Manchester City Council, The Kitchen in Bolton and businesses from within Greater Manchester such as Unicorn grocery & Cracking Good Food, with over 20 attending in total.

Some lucky members of the Kindling team have started making a short film about Greater Manchester's food heritage.

The 20 minute  documentary, to be fronted by Kindling's Chris, charts how the archetypal industrial city has been fed over the last few hundred years. From a collection of villages and market towns to the urban metropolis of 5 million people it is today, we are attempting to tell the changing story of how the city has been fed from 1750 to the present day.

Around 120 pupil, their parents and local residents of Reddish and Brinnington (Stockport) attended our Big Green Thank You event at Reddish Vale Technology College on Saturday 14th July to celebrate sustainable living.

Last Sunday and Monday I (Helen) was lucky  enough to attend the first of what will hopefully  be many gatherings, of people working towards  food sovereignty in many different ways. Over  100 community growers, producers, co- operative workers, researchers, campaigners and  activists came together to help build the food  sovereignty movement here in the UK.

Greater Manchester's sustainable food conference, FeedingManchester, reached a landmark tenth meeting on Thursday 5th July, gathering individuals and organisations together once again with shared interests in creating a more equal and secure food chain for the county.

One of the biggest challenges for community food-growing projects is finding volunteers. Big Dig is a project to help you find and keep volunteers to make sure your food-growing project is a success in the long-term.

In Greater Manchester Big Dig is being run by the Kindling Trust, and we want to help as many growing projects as possible find new volunteers. We'll be doing this by co-ordinating 3 major events: