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Local Growing Projects

>>Find out more about Supporting a Sustainable Local Food Economy

Another element to our support for sustainable local food economies is our promotion of growing projects. In 2001 we started a pilot apple treegrowing project in various school grounds as part of Snack Attack. We use organic Scottish native apple varieties such as James Grieve, Hawthornden and Scotch Bridget during these planting sessions. British orchards have been under constant threat since the 1960’s with many local varieties of apple disappearing altogether! During our planting sessions we teach the children about this loss of apple bio-diversity, British apple heritage, plant two trees and let them taste lots of different apple varieties.

This aspect of the project has expanded greatly to become "The Big Apple- An Orchard for Edinburgh". As well as doing 2 tree planting sessions in schools we have started to plant "mini orchards" in the grounds of nurseries and special needs day centres. We consider a Mini-orchard to be 4 trees or more. To date we have done around 30 apple tree plantings with plans to plant a further 7 mini-orchards in the winter of 2005-2006. During this time we also have plans to start a much larger orchard at the Cyrenian Farm in West Lothian. This will be a 150 tree orchard with a tree nursery element and plenty of room for expansion. When this orchard is in full production Snack Attack will re-purchase the apples to distribute to schools across the city and will reduce the organisation food mile account considerably.

The Big Apple has also done numerous berry bush plantings and we hope in the future to create small vegetable plots in nursery school grounds.

The Brogdale Horticultural Trust in Kent houses the British National Apple collection. Brogdale grows over 2000 different British apple varieties making it the biggest collection of apple types in the world. It also grows numerous pear and plum varieties. During the winter of 2004 for our local co-op promotion we decided to source our apples locally. We soon realised how difficult it is to source large quantities of organic British apples in Scotland. We contacted Brogdale who sold us over 20 different varieties of apples with a total weight of three quarters of a tonne. Our co-op customers were delighted to try these apples some of which, like Smiler and Case Wealthy they had not even heard of before.

We also used these apples to have an apple celebration for a whole week in a local school, Parsons Green. During this week we put on many different types of apple activitie and every pupil in the school got to try an unusual apple variety.