On Monday 27th April 2009 three of the country’s leading experts on sustainable food and agriculture spoke to a hundred and fifty people attending the Global Crisis : Organic Response debate, held in Manchester City Centre.
The event included a BBC style Question Time hosted by Patrick Holden CBE – Director of The Soil Association and presentations by Susanne Padel – Research Associate of Aberystwyth University and Lawrence Woodward OBE of Organic Research Centre Elm Farm.
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.
This Christmas Fundraiser, involved a three course meal for forty of Unicorn Grocery's staff and a disco for many of Manchester's environmental groups and businesses, including Ethical Consumer Magazine.
The night raised £900 for San José de Apartadó in Columbia.
Kindling hosted a visit from London food co-operative Organic Lea at the end of October 2009 as part of an information exchange.The eight members of Organic Lea have just taken on Hawkwood Nursery, a 12 acre site on the edge of Waltham Forest as a focus for urban food production and training.
The two days included visits to Hulme Community Garden Centre; Unicorn Grocery; Fairfield Materials Management; Glebelands City Growers and Unicorn's growing project: Moss Brooke.
One of our party nights in Hulme, this time proceeds went to help rebuild the Clinica La Guadalupana hospital in the Zapatista community of Oventik in Chiapas, Mexico, which was recently destroyed by fire.
On this occasion we raised over £400. Previous disco have raised nearly £400 for the El Salvadorean Permaculture Association and £450 for Peace Brigades International.
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.
The Kindling Trust is working with staff and pupils of St. Margaret's Primary School and local residents to explore the heritage and history of food growing, cooking and selling in Whalley Range.
The children at St. Margaret's School have been interviewing older people with a particular interest or viewpoint of Whalley Range's food history, in preparation for creating a 2009 calendar.
We provide logistical support for the training and selection weeks of Peace Brigades International - Guatemala. The weeks are a lot of work (for both the trainers and the participants) and Kindling feels that it is essential that the logisics flow smoothly, allowing the group to focus on their work. It is our role to arrange a suitable and affordable venue, provide materials and transport, look after the training team during the preparation and evaluation process, and provide the meals.
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.
We were delighted to work with Old Trafford Amateur Gardeners' Society at their Open Day at Seymour Grove Allotments in Old Trafford. The event was a great success, with hundreds of visitors coming and raising 450 pounds. Members of The Kindling trust helped out across the site on the day. We also held two food sampling sessions for kids and parents, where we visited allotments, picked fresh salad leaves, herbs, tomatoes and seasonal fruit and then mixed up individual salad dressings to taste with our freshly picked food.
