Last year, we came together with local organisations to make our first ever Great Community Tattie Patch at the farm. Local groups bought a share of seed potatoes, and came to the farm to get involved in planting and harvesting the tatties across the season, finishing with a celebratory meal. This project brought many local people together to experience the whole process of getting food onto plates. It was a real, and fun, way for people to take back some power in the food system, and get a wee taste of food sovereignty, as well as good local tatties.

This year, together with the R2 North Edinburgh Community Festival team, we are celebrating beans and peas. So we are now prepping beds for growing piles of beans and peas to share in our community (with the community helping to sow, care for and harvest, share, cook and eat them). But because the tatties were so universally loved, we have decided to include a tattie patch too.

How to Get Involved This Year

Your group could come to help plant the vegetables, do a bit of weeding or help us to harvest.

We are also looking for organisations to make a financial contribution towards the project. For labour, seeds, and land prep, the project is costing about £3800 to the farm, and we don’t yet have the funding to cover this. So if you would like to make a financial contribution, this makes a big difference to what we can do.

Please note, if you can’t make a financial contribution, but would like to get people from your local community involved, please still get in touch – you’d be making an important contribution and we want as many folk as possible to be part of this.

To get involved, please contact us – and come along to the meal to launch the project on Thursday 26 March if you can (click here for event details)

About Our Contributors So Far

We are really pleased that Sowing Our Horizons and Fresh Start have already offered to help cover some of the costs. Fresh Start may be familiar to many of you for the work they do helping those who have been homeless or are at risk of homelessness. Food growing is a big part of their work, as is sharing that food through their community meals, so we are looking forward to their involvement in the growing. Sowing our Horizons is a newer entity. They are encouraging people to invest in shifting our food system, by giving financial support to partnerships between organisations working to change food systems. They have started with us at Lauriston Farm, Granton Community Gardeners and Scran Academy. The invitation is for people who fly to put money into the fund whenever you take a flight – as an alternative to ‘carbon offsetting’. Your return on investment is the benefit to your community from investing in a local, community-owned, circular food system. There’s much more about this on the Sowing Our Horizons website.