Growing Wheat, Oats, Rye & Barley

We have the Great Granton Wheat growing at the farm! Through years of work, started by Granton Community Gardeners, north Edinburgh has its own, community-owned wheat variety: Granton Rouge d’Ecosse. We have been sowing it in increasingly large amounts each year at the farm, to build up the stock of seeds. The dream is to grow enough to supply Granton Garden Bakery.

We are also trialling other heritage grains in the Market Garden including oat, barley and rye, in partnership with Granton Community Gardeners, the James Hutton Institute, and other agroecology projects.

Each year, we also grow a History of Wheat plot in the Community Allotments and Garden. The community sows the plot to tell the story of this very long plant x human partnership, from the Fertile Crescent in Western Asia and North Africa to here. Look out for History of Wheat events on the calendar every July and October and come along to get involved.

Saving Seeds

A community-owned food system starts with seeds.

At the farm, we grow some crops mainly for their seed. This includes commissions from Seeds of Scotland, as well as crops that we are growing as part of The Gaia Foundation’s Seed Sovereignty crowd-breeding project. We also save seeds from the crops we grow for eating. We let some of the most successful plants go to seed, so we can save those seeds and sow again.

In an ongoing project called ‘Our Seeds’, we are also supporting people in our community to save their own seed and share it with others. This is the basis of a resilient food system, and food sovereignty. We save seed to stock the Seed Kist, to giveaway to our community at our seed shares. We run workshops on how to save and sow seeds, as well as being available for questions at the weekly drop-ins, seed shares and other seed events. Look out for seed events in our events calendar every year from September to February.

You can also join the new North Edinburgh Community Seed-Saving Initiative (started winter 2025-2026). This is open to anyone in North Edinburgh who is saving seed or interested in saving seed. Contact us to let us know you’re interested in joining and we’ll send you details of the next meet up.

Our Seeds: all seeds are migrants, every seed has a story

The Seed Kist

Here is the beautiful poem The Seed Kist written and performed by Iona Lee for We Feed the UK, inspired by the seed projects at the farm: