What is the Green Street Programme?

Fancy a job here at the farm?

Check tomorrow's Evening Post.

“Green Street”

What is “Green Street?” Stonebridge recently won funding from the Big Lottery Fund to deliver a project called “Green Street”. The project aims to improve access to fresh, locally grown and affordable produce including a diverse range of vegetables, fruit, herbs, spices, free-range eggs and honey. It also aims to increase supply of local produce in an area where healthy food is in short supply.

Plantlets: Residents of Stonebridge Park Estate, Sneinton, St Ann’s and Dales will be supplied with the semi-grown plants and encouraged to grow their own produce in around two hundred new home-based, supported, growing schemes.

Urban Growing Zones: Home growing will be encouraged by an Outreach worker who will help set up Urban Growing Zones in resident’s homes, even those with limited space. Food can be grown in tyre beds, raised beds, containers, buckets and window boxes: the Outreach worker will advise. We’ll also supply a support skills DVD to make sure growing is sustained and growing skills develop.

Volunteers: Additionally, new and existing volunteers will grow large quantities of produce “plantlets” in our polytunnels and on open farm space. Volunteers will receive a skills based Stonebridge Food Growing Certificate at the Harvest Festival.

“Beewise” Beekeeping: A parallel beekeeping and honey production programme called “Beewise”. This programme is unique in this area; demand is high in an era of Colony Collapse Disorder which may put local honey supplies at risk in the future.

“Green Talk” Message Board: The Outreach worker will help establish a virtual message board/community with a 24hour question and answer facility.

Harvest Festival: Each year, there will be a Harvest Festival of Local Food where enrolees can display their wares, locals can sample local food recipes and ancient rural skills will be demonstrated including Scarecrow making and Wicker rituals. Eastern European residents can bring their children to meet Krampus!

Beneficiaries: We hope to raise awareness with local groups such as lone parents, people with disabilities, low income families, incapacity benefit/ESA claimants and young people (groups who are excluded from healthy food, often by price barriers), and we expect they will benefit tremendously from the project.

Outreach Worker
Green Street’s Outreach Worker is tasked with engaging the local community. The role is primarily external and mobile: ensuring people are involved and enroled; that outcome targets are reached; making sure interested members of the local community are enthused about growing and eating self-grown local food. The worker will offer an advice service about all aspects of pesticide-free food growing. Around a hundred Urban Growing Zones will be established each year in the home and the worker will be helping to establish and embed them in person, at the farm, on the internet, or over the phone. Working alongside the Horticultural Supervisor and Green Street Horticulturalist in a three person team, the Outreach Worker will play a critical role in publicising local food growing to volunteers, farm visitors, partners (such as the Garden-To-Plate network) and stakeholders (such as local councillors), thus ensuring the successful culmination of the Green Street Project.

Stonebridge City Farm New Project

Hi everyone,

This is Mark Barry here at Stonebridge City Farm in Nottingham. We're one of the nation's oldest City farms and we're growing all the time. I'll put some photos and links up in future blog postings.

Why the blog?

Through the Big Lottery Fund and the Royal Wildlife Trust, we're about to deliver a three year project to encourage local people in St Ann's, Sneinton, Dales and throughout Nottingham to grow their own food. We're also going to be delivering beekeeping courses over the next three years. This blog is going to track progress throughout the project and encourage Nottingham people to get involved.

The project is called "Green Street", which we thought was a cool name for something delivered by an urban farm. It's green and the farm is on an urban street. Nuff said!

Until we get the project - and the blog - started properly, which will be over the next month, why not visit us or visit our website:

www.stonebridgecityfarm.com

We've got a specific e-mail address for more information on enrolment, which will be checked once per day. This is purely for Green Street business.

stonebridgegreenstreet@googlemail.com

which is something of a keyboardful, I know!

Our normal e-mail address is:

stonebridgefarm@myway.com

for any other business pertaining to the farm.

We're about to get our Twitter account started. Rather than being written by yours truly, we'll be delegating the Twitter responsibility to Custard the Goat who has been referred to on many occasions as the fourteenth member of staff! She's far more interesting than me anyway!!!

I'll update later on Twitter development (as I have no idea what to do about it)

We do have a sporadic Facebook presence for the farm and that will also be linked. Anyone who enrols on Green Street will be able to join a private message board called "Green Talk"; which will eventually become a virtual community of gardeners and home food producers in Nottingham.

More later and best of luck today.

Mark