Celebrations As Bristol City Farm Is Saved By Hitting £50K Target

Bristol Evening News
December 21, 2009,

A city farm in Bedminster has been saved from closure thanks to the public, who have helped raise £50,000 in just five months.

The four-and-a-half-acre farm was started on derelict land in 1976 as a result of the demands of local people, and has grown to an attraction visited by 200,000 people every year.

Windmill Hill City Farm, which currently employs 80 people, is a registered charity, so there is no charge for entry, but every donation helps to keep the farm operating as a free community facility for the enjoyment of the public.

With an annual turnover of just below £1 million, the farm generates about 70 per cent of this, leaving 30 per cent to raise through other means each year.

Last year, the farm didn’t manage to raise the 30 per cent, and had no choice but to use its reserves.

Windmill Hill City Farm gives the public the opportunity to learn about farming and to become involved in the production of their food.

Animals on the farm include a variety of goats, sheep, pigs, cattle and poultry.

It is a working farm, with community garden plots and a wildlife conservation area. Organic fruit and vegetables are grown and supplied to the farm shop and cafe.

Schools take trips to the farm for guided tours, and the farm also offers hands-on activities for people with learning difficulties, as well as opportunities for trainees and volunteers.

The farm runs educational courses in partnership with the Workers’ Educational Association, including computer and photography courses, arts and crafts, and horticulture.

There is also a 50-place nursery and an adventure playground on site, and an all-weather sport pitch.

See the complete article here.

See the Windmill Hill City Farm website here.

Leadenhall City Farm
By Mitchell Taylor Workshop

“Parks, allotments and markets are set to spring up across Britain on the sites of building projects that have been mothballed in the recession.

“Piers Taylor, of Mitchell Taylor Workshop, one of the practices shortlisted for the Leadenhall site has proposed a city farm, populated with colour-coded chickens. He wants to create grassy banks to picnic on and plant blackberry bushes amid the surrounding steel, granite and glass.”
- from The Times Oct 30, 2009

Mitchell Taylor Workshop: 122 Leadenhall Street

Introduction

This proposal for the site in Leadenhall addresses three key issues: public open space; views into the site from neighbouring buildings, and radically enhancing the the Leadenhall street frontage.

It does this through the creation of a city farm with public access that has a seasonal planting strategy designed using careful sunlight analysis, and a series of ‘outlets’ that sit in the hoarding on Leadenhall street selling produce grown on site, and a soup kitchen on the gantry serving food prepared with ingredients from the site.

Scale and incident are added through the addition of a number of key growing enclosures which would be constructed during the 2010 ‘Studio in the Woods’ which we would propose is held on the site.

We believe that in addition the value added to the site for minimum outlay, that there is a joy in reconnecting with the earth that would once have been on the site. We have made a place where city workers can smell/sniff/taste/touch/buy produce grown on site, walk through flowerbeds, picnic on wildflower banks, and watch the changing seasons.

Strategy for Management

Riverford Organic have indicated that they are interested in being the first ‘stakeholder’ for the site, advising on getting the site established and economically independent. It is envisaged from conversations with Riverford that there could be a number of people employed on the site, paid by the commercial sale of produce from the city farm.

Strategy for Growing

A palette of vegetables, fruits, cereal crops and flowers and has been put together to allow produce to be cropped each month and to provide plant interest and colour throughout the year.

The site has three distinct growing areas; full sun, partial shade and deep shade, each with its own distinct character. The sunniest part of the site will be home to fruiting vegetables, soft fruits, herbs and root vegetables. Leafy, green crops such as cabbages, broccoli and spinach can cope with more shade, so will occupy the central, partially shaded part of the site. In the deep shade of the southern part of the site there will be a log forest of exotic mushrooms, such shitake and oysters underplanted with shade tolerant crops such as rhubarb and mint.
The garden will be a place for city workers to escape to at lunch times, a place for children to learn from and a source of food for the proposed booths along Leadenhall Street.

Strategy for Infastructure

Infrastructure is minimal and cost effective. The main planters use standard size precast drainage channels filled with soil contained in a standard ‘dumpy’ bag. This enables the planters to be flexible, recycled, and easily relocated on this site, or to another site. A modest amount of terracing is needed on the east and south facing ‘bank’ in the north west of the site, and this could simply be carried out with a mini digger and scaffold boards as retaining devices. The hoarding can be retained, albeit with the addition of cut outs in the shape of vegetables to access the ‘outlets’ contained behind the hoarding, which could also be constructed from scaffolding and boarding.

It is proposed that four larger growing ‘devices’ are located around the site, which would be constructed during the 2010 ‘Studio in the Woods’ which is hosted by Mitchell Taylor Workshop. These could also be used to house chickens and other livestock.

Strategy for Cost

Our cost plan shows that £125k covers the purchase or drainage channels, soil, dumpy bags, scaffolding and minor re terracing of the bank, the creation of the ‘outlets’ along Leadenhall Street (accessed through the hoarding) and also the construction of the ‘growing devices’ to be constructed during the 2010 Studio in the Woods. However, if budget was slashed, just the ‘booths’ along Leadenhall Street could be constructed.

See Mitchell Taylor Workshop here.

See large Presentation Boards here. They can be enlarged for better viewing.

First here.

Second here.

See Times article: Allotments, parks and urban farms are rising above Britain’s gleaming towers here.

By Liz Hoggard
London Evening Standard
June 11, 2009

Rosie Boycott — career feminist, newspaper supremo and Mayor Boris Johnson’s “Food Tsar” — is proof you can start gardening at any age.

She was 51 before she picked up a spade. “Six years ago, I’d never grown a single vegetable,” she laughs.

Like many frazzled Londoners, she thought growing your own was some boring activity reserved for dullards and oldies with nothing better to do. Back then her life was full of smart parties and TV appearances. The first female editor of The Independent newspapers, she socialised with actors and politicians. In 1998 she became the editor of the Daily Express. But then in 2001 she lost her job when the paper was acquired by Richard Desmond.

She bought a smallholding in Somerset with her husband Charlie, a London QC. But overwhelmed by emptiness and depression, Boycott, an ex-alcoholic, started drinking again after 22 years.

In 2003 she was involved in a drink-driving accident, breaking her leg so badly that doctors feared she might lose it. She checked into the Life Works therapeutic community in Surrey and began to realise that work had become a substitute addiction.

Convalescence, which took 20 months, left her re-evaluating her life completely.

Hobbling around on crutches, she found one of the few things she could do was garden.

“I had to switch my head out of the hurry and have it now’ culture,” she tells me.

“All I could do while my leg healed was make sure I ate muesli and exercised according to doctor’s orders.

It was fantastically difficult, but gardening became incredibly important.

It taught me patience — when you plant a seed you can’t do much, all you can do is water it and give it the right soil and sunlight.

See complete article here.

By Sam Jones
The Guardian, June 30 2008

Designed for the Prince Regent by the architect John Nash, Regent’s Park is noted for its lovingly tended blooms. But soon the flower beds of that – and other London royal parks – could make way for rows of humble carrots, cabbages and globe artichokes.

In a plan inspired by American cities, the royal parks are pondering the creation of a string of model allotments to give the public a living, ripening illustration of the virtues of growing your own fruit and vegetables.

“The royal parks’ role is not to have huge areas of land changed, but to act as a demonstration area to show what can be achieved,” said Colin Buttery, the parks’ chief executive. “We very much want to support the idea of people growing their food by doing small-scale demonstrations.”

Link to ‘Seeds of Change’ article here.

DIG FOR VICTORY: WAR ON WASTE
22 May – 30 September 2008

The Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms and The Royal Parks are promoting sustainability and recycling at a Second World War-themed allotment, open in St James’s Park from 22 May 2008.

Link to site here.

Park Veg: ‘Incorporate edibles in among the ornamental beds’

Listen to audio file here.

New report shows edible cities are the future – Edible Cities, looks at examples of urban agriculture projects in cities and identifies a series of opportunities that other cities could be adopting.

The British group visited an inspiring range of projects in Milwaukee, Chicago and New York and noted a number of similarities to and differences from urban agriculture initiatives in London, including:

• A commercial element to many of the US projects, which is much less common in the UK;

• A more liberal situation in the US than in the UK to encourage composting, but less willingness than in the UK to include animals in some urban agriculture projects;

• Different approaches to fencing and public access to projects, which varied within the US, depending on context;

• Imaginative and productive ways of growing without access to subsoil, either in raised beds on hard surfaces or, in one case, in hydroponics on a barge;

• Inspiring use of an holistic and sustainable approach to fish farming in an urban area which produces marketable quantities of tilapia.

The trip stimulated a number of ideas for how to promote more food growing in more cities.  These include:

• Using the many possibilities of urban tree planting to promote traditional varieties of fruit and nuts;

• Untapping the potential of both Royal Parks and other parks to accommodate some food growing in their grounds;

• Exploring under-utilised spaces such as derelict council property, private gardens and social housing to grow food;

• Making use of the abundant buildings in urban areas to grow food on rooftops, up walls and in window boxes;

• Building on the food growing expertise that already exists in a multicultural community, as well as providing education and training for new growers.

Read the complete Report here and donate to support the work of Sustain.

New British magazine.

“Well Clayton in Manchester was just about the most inner city district in the country and we lived the ‘Good Life’ there. Only we didn’t really know it was the good life – it was just life. In amongst the back streets, where everything was purple from the dye works or noisy and full of smoke from the wireworks, we had hens and their eggs, pigs for their meat, and by the river there was an old man who kept sheep with whom we’d do a swap – a clutch of plucked hens for half a lamb.

“Within sight of my bedroom you could see the remains of Manchester United’s first stadium, the power station, a dozen factories, including the one that the Germans bombed, my school, rows of back to back houses and a few dozen little farms, because we all did our own. Own food, own furniture, own everything really.”

Link to Home Farmer magazine here.

From the Editor’s Blog:

Small-holding in the Inner City – 25/01/2008
“When I look back on my childhood in the sixties there are lots of things I really miss. Helping out at the abattoir sounds a bit gross to modern ears but at least it wasn’t as smelly as the tripe works at the end of the street! I loved working with the pigs at the abattoir; they would come from the pig man who lived on the Dingle. Everyone had a swill bin and all our scraps went in it. The pig man would collect the bin every week and boil it up for the pigs. In payment for our waste we got a turkey for Christmas, and I helped with those too!

“Then I loved going to Mr. Dennis’ because he had hens like ours – in an old Andersen air raid shelter and I remember listening to England win the World Cup and shouting so loud that an old hen dropped an egg right in front of me.

“Then there was my grannies – she made the best cheese sandwiches in the world. The cheese came from her washing line in an old muslin bag where it had been draining since she made it early in the morning.

“Why am I telling you all this? Well Clayton in Manchester was just about the most inner city district in the country and we lived the ‘Good Life’ there. Only we didn’t really know it was the good life – it was just life. In amongst the back streets, where everything was purple from the dye works or noisy and full of smoke from the wireworks, we had hens and their eggs, pigs for their meat, and by the river there was an old man who kept sheep with whom we’d do a swap – a clutch of plucked hens for half a lamb.

“Within sight of my bedroom you could see the remains of Manchester United’s first stadium, the power station, a dozen factories, including the one that the Germans bombed, my school, rows of back to back houses and a few dozen little farms, because we all did our own. Own food, own furniture, own everything really. I bet if I went into every garden in Clayton today I wouldn’t find a hen or a pig. I know I wouldn’t find an abattoir and the tripe works became a Youth Centre. There are no butchers or greengrocers either – only a DVD shop and dusty old newsagents. The allotments and the sheep? They are now lost under the concrete of a retail park.

“This magazine is for everyone who, be they dreamers and would love to have a go at keeping hens, or realists and have already got their hands dirty and might even have a little land. We are going to grow wheat and make our own bread – cook it in our own oven too made from our own mud. We are going to fish and salt herring, make furniture, keep hens, make the healthiest bacon in the world, build polytunnels, hunt for land, keep sheep and even a cow and on top of it all, be responsible for our own food. To eat proper food, clean food, chemical free food, grown mostly by ourselves.

“Of course, in this day and age, we have to go to the supermarket, drive a car, go to the cinema, but the fundamental idea behind Home Farmer is anyone can live ‘The Good Life’ whether they live in a council house in the inner city or in a moorland farm or a valley smallholding. Not because it fits the ‘must have’ way of life, not because it is trendy or new. Just because, as my grandfather put it when he taught me about his hens, ‘…if you don’t know that, you don’t know nowt!’ ”

Link to Editor’s Blog here.

“Planting was completed in Spring 2002 and the garden is now well established. In an area of 200 m2, over 120 species of perennial plants from around the world thrive in soil only 30cm deep. The garden supports a range of layers, from roots, through small shrubs to our miniature version of a canopy layer. Most have multiple uses: food, medicine, fuel, fibre, construction, dye, scent.

“The garden demonstrates many ways we can all reduce our environmental footprint. Features include: composting of kitchen waste from the Global Cafe, irrigation using harvested rainwater pumped by renewable energy from a solar array and wind turbine, use of recovered soil and recycled newspaper, wood, stone and plastic in its construction.”

Link to roof garden here.