This year is the end of Growing Local’s first decade and it has presented both challenges and opportunities. Over the last ten years we have had a ball.  Building a wonderful educational garden and field kitchen at Court Farm Tillington, building our relationships with the local community and schools and building our relationship with growers and customers. The next ten years need to be equally as energetic and innovative as we play our part in developing a more sustainable food network that helps our communities meet the challenges of climate change. 

As many of you know Court Farm, Tillington, the home of our educational garden, closed its Pick Your Own and Farm Shop in the autumn of 2018. Together with other small producers in the county closing, this has led to some difficulty in accessing the very best summer fruit and vegetables for Growing Local, leading us to have a major rethink as to how to move forward over the next few years. 

As a result, we have decided to hand over the Veg Bag Scheme to our main grower and supplier, John Davenport of Little Marcle Farm Shop.  After ten years of running the scheme Pat feels it is the right time to retire from this part of her work, so that she can devote her energies to the medium and longer term changes and challenges involving the relocation of the garden and field kitchen and bringing the provenance of our fruit and vegetables closer to our community. 

The Growing Local Veg Bag Scheme will therefore be taken over by John Davenport of Little Marcle Farm Shop on Thursday 1st August 2019, first delivery from John , Friday 2nd August 2o19

We hope that our customers will hardly notice the difference as we move to John’s fully organic scheme.  John and Pat are working hard to streamline the Veg Box offer to make the change over as smooth for our customers as possible. For full details please go to https://growinglocal.org.uk/important-changes-to-our-veg-bag-scheme/

A personal message from Pat G

Thank thank you to all the customers who have supported us over the last 10 years. Thank-you for all the kind messages. I will really miss the regular contact with so many lovely people- BUT we are not going away.. our education work continues under the excellent management of Louisa, and Growing Local has an important role to play in developing and encourage more  growing and community gardening- WATCH THIS SPACE AND PLEASE STAY IN TOUCH 

Best wishes

Patg