Last week the Land Army visited Growing with Grace in Clapham, near Lancaster. The 120 mile round trip was a bit longer than our usual Land Army missions to farms in Greater Manchester - and meant a very early start! - but this was a great opportunity for our volunteers to visit a long standing community co-operative farm dedicated to producing sustainably grown food.
Growing with Grace has been operating for 15 years, growing organic fruit and vegetables under nearly 2 acres of glasshouses, using stockfree methods. In addition to their on site farm shop, Growing with Grace also runs a veg box delivery scheme and supplies local restaurants and businesses, giving them plenty to do at this time of year.
The biggest job of the day was clearing two beds of enormous purple sprouting broccoli plants, which had finished cropping. The high temperatures of the glass houses had allowed the plants to grow to huge proportions and it was quite a job to pull them out by the roots and transport them to the compost pile. Once removed, we cleared the debris and rolled back the ground cover – ready for winter beetroot to be planted out.
We also helped with harvesting what felt like tonnes of french and runner beans for the veg box scheme, weeding a green manure bed of alfalfa and maintaining the chard and spinach beds. Lead grower Cara gave us an informative tour of the various glasshouses where we saw an abundance of tomatoes, some wonderful looking aubergines, cucumbers, various salads and even some figs and grapes!
We weren't the only volunteers on site that day. We were joined by people from Clapham village and from nearby Lancaster and worked alongside Wwoofer Dave, who it turned out is also from Manchester. Over a delicious home-cooked lunch – provided by Ann Marie, also a grower at the site – we had the opportunity to chat and tell people about the work the Land Army does in Manchester with our local organic growers.
It was great to meet like-minded people and connect with a farm doing brilliant work to provide local people with the opportunity to eat locally produced organic food. The day went by too fast, but as usual our Land Army volunteers worked their socks off and we left knowing we had made a real difference.