Well in order to deliver a course on Urban Farming we needed a farm... well OK a garden to start with and great ambition that we would be able to grow.!! We had a piece of land just past the cricket nets (thats probably trade description libellous as they had no nets and hadn't seen a googly for some years) and there was evidence of some leftovers from a previous life when another member of staff had done some growing with small groups of students and even built a poly-tunnel whilst they watched and made the tea.!! What we needed was some money to make it a reality and it only took a week or so to fill in the million page funding request forms for the government to support such a scheme off the back fo the great Jamie Oliver revolution.
Soon we had 2 greenhouses thanks to www.littlegreenfingers.com and began the hard labour of getting young people to work out how to push a barrow, dig holes, move compost and water without drowning. Before much longer we had seeds becoming plants and plants bearing fruit and veg and the question of what do we do with it now? Suggestions from the staffroom included, give it to the kitchen but include instructions as cook might not recognise a fresh vegetable un-diced and not in a plastic freezer bag, sell it at a market and let the kids take them home (again concerns about the parents knowing what to do with fresh veg were voiced). Well with this level of confidence there was obviously a need for some further research so I began asking other staff, parents and students what they thought would be best to do with the produce and our community links manager Lisa gave birth (in fact she is about to right this month for real) to the concept of streetgrowers. Her thought process is not entirely clear but then thinking was not a required skill on her person specification, but the reasoning given was that the kids were growing produce in the town and could take it to farmers markets to sell to people in the country... beautiful.
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