Building a connection to seasonal food can be a great way to eat the most nutritious, sustainable food available throughout the year. And growing your own food is one of the best ways to build that connection to the seasons.
To offer more people the opportunity to learn about seasonal growing, Bridgend Sustainable Food Partnership has supported Slade Farm Organics, an organic market garden, to launch a series of practical workshops throughout the growing year.
The spring workshops launched in April, with plans to follow up with summer and autumn sessions. Participants can attend single sessions, or sign up for multiple workshops to learn about the annual cycle of a working organic farm.
The sessions are aimed at home growers, people who are interested in starting to grow or anyone with an interest in how seasonal, organic food is produced.
Starting in spring, the first course focused on the changes in the garden as the soil temperature starts to rise, daylight increases and sowing starts. On a tour of the market garden, participants were introduced to the various methods of propagation used to start off the crops and how they are protected as they start to grow.
The session covered key planning concepts to consider for anyone starting out with a new growing space, such as how to plan successional sowings and crop rotations to ensure a supply of food throughout the season, and how to plan out a vegetable bed to maximise what can be grown.
The group also learned about the challenges most growers face in the early season, from the unpredictable weather to dealing with slugs and pigeons eating your seedlings.
To help the group apply what they’d learnt at home, a practical session involved everyone in preparing a new bed using the no-dig method, techniques for raising seeds, from sowing in modules and pricking out seedlings, to direct sowing in prepared soil, and keeping tender young seedlings protected with fleece and tunnels.
Graeme Wilson, farmer and grower at Slade Farm Organics said:
“It was great to see how people grew in confidence through the workshop. That’s the big advantage of practical sessions in a farming environment – people can get hands-on experience and learn from our team here. Even though the scale of what we do at the market garden might be different, there’s so much knowledge we can pass on for people to use at home to grow successfully, seasonally and sustainably.
“We really hope we can help people to build a much stronger connection to how their food is produced – and inspire people to share the knowledge with their own family, friends and community,” he said.
Information about future workshops will be shared via our newsletter and through the Bridgend Sustainable Food Partnership social media channels.