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Kindling spent much of Tuesday 5th July at the Food For Life Partnership Northern Awards ceremony at Manchester Town Hall, where schools and caterers were acknowledged for their hard work to increase the uptake of healthy sustainable food.

In front of a hundred delegates, eleven schools from the North of England were congratulated for their fabulous work in transforming food culture in their schools and communities.  We heard about the inspiring work going on across the North to reconnect young people with healthy food produced by local farmers.

For the past 10 years the Sainsbury Laboratory at the John Innes Centre in Norwich have been researching GM techology to provide blight resistance in potatoes, so far they have been unsuccessful. Meanwhile a number of conventionally bred blight resistant potatoes have been developed which are already available on the market - such as the impressive Sarpo varieties developed by Savari Research Trust in North Wales.

Do you fancy learning some new farming skills; spending half a day on a beautiful farm with a nice bunch of people; helping out local farmers, and being part of a wider movement to increase sustainable food production around the City?

Then Greater Manchester's Land Army is just the thing for you!

The Forgotten Fields project has begun to explore the food heritage of Westwood Park area of Eccles, near Worsley.

Forgotten Fields is a project focused on the heritage of food production and availability in Manchester from 1750’s to present day. It concentrates on six communities from across Greater Manchester that have expressed a need to explore a particular food heritage.

The 11th of June saw energy professionals, campaigners and local residents coming together to found Manchester's Carbon Coop! While pilots for the project have been run in various parts of South Manchester over the last few year, this was the point that the project was passed over to it's potential founding members. In a packed all-day meeting we hammered out details of how the Carbon Coop (and it's sister investment cooperative - the Carbon Saving Society)  would function and how they would be managed.

On the 13th of May Helen from Kindling and Alan from Manchester Veg People went to Flaxdrayton Farm in Somerset, to visit Christina Ballinger to talk producer co-ops. Christina and her husband Peter were involved in the founding of Somerset Organic Link (SOL), and SOL Producers, which was originally a producers co-operative (of which Peter was one of the producers).

Kindling presented it plans for a Greater Manchester Land Army at the Making Local Food Work conference in Sheffield on the 12th May.

The day long conference entitled: Rooting community food in an enterprising future was aiming to: help build sustainable local food systems and encourage communities to get involved in any of the diverse range of community food enterprises in existence, from Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and group buying schemes to Farmers’ Markets and community-owned shops.

Manchester's Carbon Co-op is very excited to announce its submission to the innovative Energyshare programme for moral & financial support to begin putting solar panels on our City's roofs.

Energyshare is a fledgling online community of renewable energy & energy efficiency organisations and innitiatives, offering advice and information, an opportunity to contact and network with simialr projects and secure financial support.

The Carbon Co-op have been collaborating with the Kindling Trust to run a series of networking sessions for community renewables in Greater Manchester entitled, Fuelling Manchester. The events are purely social and the next one takes place on Thursday 26th May 2011.

This fifth gathering is for all those of us involved in community renewable projects, be that: water turbine co-operatives; bio-mass and woodland management enterprises; waste-to-energy projects, solar energy collectives or those involved in community-focused.

FeedingManchester.org.uk is a brand new website for Greater Manchester residents who love food and want to eat in a healthier, greener and fairer way. The website provides extensive information about buying, growing, cooking, eating and loving local fresh produce. It connects buyers with growers, customers with farmers, and cooks with ingredients. For sustainable urban foodies, we think this site will definitely become a favourite.