#Carrots4Communities builds on ideas of #GrowCookShare, which is where communities or individuals grow food both for themselves or others, then do some community cooking (whether with classes or simply getting together to cook), and the products are shared amongst the groups who grew and cooked, as well as possibly with other community groups such as warm spaces.
#Carrots4Communities is a small-scale pilot project for a much larger project next year. If the pilot is successful, next year’s project will involve a wide range of vegetables. This year, unremarkably given the name, we will be focussing on carrots, and particularly a variety called ‘Autumn King’ which can be planted in July for a late autumn harvest. This ties in with when ‘warm spaces’ might be needed within our community, and attendees might welcome a bowl of hot carrot soup or a slice of delicious carrot cake.
Carrot cake and soup are just examples of what you might produce – someone in our community is already researching/writing recipes based on carrots that you’ll be able to use but in the meantime we need to get some ‘Autumn King’ carrots planted very quickly.
Mary, our Community Food Co-ordinator, has purchased a quantity of packets of seeds and is inviting you to have one of these and get planting as soon as you can – one packet doesn’t sound much but each packet does have 1000 seeds in!
If you would like to take part in this project, or suggest someone else who might, please reply to this email, simply letting me know:
- Grow – The name of your community group
- You can grow as an individual and donate the carrots to a local group for the cooking and sharing
- Cook – Where you might do the cooking or which group might do it
- Let me know if you’d like to use this as an opportunity to teach people to cook
- Share – Which ‘warm space’ or other community group that you might want to eat the produce
- This can be your group or another one but ideally is a group who maybe wouldn’t normally have easy access to freshly cooked food
You don’t have to be 100% certain about the cooking and sharing aspect – what is most important now is that we get some carrot seeds into the ground quickly so they can grow – that way, we will hopefully have plenty of #Carrots4Communities
Please contact Mary, our Community Food Co-ordinator, as soon as you can – seeds will be allocated on a first come first served based and either you can collect from our office or she can deliver them to you. You can email Mary at mary@nbforum.org.uk or call Mary on 07736 939171
