The mid-August sun beats down on a small area of farmland near Lancaster as volunteers pull out weeds, pick crops, and enjoy each other’s company.
Beans, peas, beetroot, chard, lettuce and cabbages are just some of the vegetables laid out in neat rows at The Plot – a community-led market garden which has been growing organic food at Old Holly Farm on the A6 at Cabus since 2021.
It also has a growing site in a polytunnel near Morecambe.
Kate Crook, from Garstang, has volunteered with the project since its inception, and has relished the community feeling and skill sharing it offers.
She breaks off from the weeding to talk about her involvement.
“We meet every Wednesday and we do whatever needs doing on the day because through the year it changes.
“It might be digging out dock plants early in the season or at the moment it’s weeding because the weather is just going crazy and making things grow so quickly.
“I just love it because when you go home for the day you look back and you can see what you’ve done and you think you have achieved something here.”
The Plot is run by Lancaster District Community Interest Company LESS, set up in 2007 to help Lancashire residents live more sustainably.
LESS coordinates a wide range of environmental and community projects, including FoodFutures North Lancashire, the district’s award winning Sustainable Food Places partnership.
LESS has already had an eventful year – it bought a three acre plot of agricultural land off Ashton Road in Lancaster in February, and is now exploring ideas for its future use.
Meanwhile FoodFutures is currently spearheading a campaign to help North Lancashire achieve a Gold Sustainable Food Places award by 2026.
But funding has always been an uncertainty for these small-scale community food projects, so in 2020, LESS launched its FoodFriends scheme with aims to become more self-sustaining, while supporting the training of new small-scale farmers through a programme called FarmStart.
Almost all agriculture in the UK has been supported by subsidies, but these are rarely easily able to support small farms.
In addition, it’s generally difficult to get grant funding for new enterprises, so the FoodFriends scheme was set up to fill this gap.
Ellen Pearce, coordinator at The Plot, said: “Through our experiences of running The Plot we understood how hard it was for small local producers to get food to the customer…so we are now part of Gather which is a collaboration of about 10 local producers, where we all come together to market and sell our produce.
“The FoodFriends scheme was set up to provide an independent source of funding for projects such as these so that they are not reliant on grant funding, and it was a way of enabling local residents passionate about local food and bringing back food production to our district to enable them to support the set up of this sort of project.”
With every £5 FoodFriends number purchased, members have the opportunity to win six £30 vouchers on a monthly basis to be used with one of its local food partners.
There are currently around 150 people signed up to the scheme, and LESS are looking for 350 new members to help ensure that the Plot is financially stable in the longer term.
Kate added that she couldn’t think of anything to buy her son for Christmas, so she enrolled him on the FoodFriends scheme in July, and not long after he won a food hamper.
“It’s just a wonderful way of getting people interested,” she said.
“It’s not just us lot coming gardening, it’s about the wider world knowing about it and doing a bit themselves.
“They might not be able to come and garden but they could support FoodFriends.”
You can sign up to the FoodFriends scheme by visiting www.foodfutures.org.uk/foodfriends.
