Food growing has been one of the threads running through our first year at Cheltenham Action for Nature.
We started by listening and learning – talking to allotment holders and at home growers about what they love about growing, the challenges they face and what they would like to see happen in the future. Along the way, we discovered just how much knowledge, enthusiasm and experience there is among people who grow food across Cheltenham.
We’ve followed that thread in lots of different directions.
We’ve shared stories from allotments, including Sarah Payne’s reflections on the wildlife that turns up on a plot – not always welcome, but part of the picture. We helped start Grow Your Own Cheltenham, a Facebook group bringing local growers together to share ideas, questions, seeds and experience. And we’ve supported allotment holders to run talks and workshops, creating opportunities for growers to learn from one another.
We’ve also been finding out more about the different ways people are growing in Cheltenham. We visited the Community Rest Garden, a small space on Tewkesbury Road that shows what can happen when people come together to care for and grow in a shared place. We spent time finding out about seed saving with Down to Earth Stroud, exploring how those skills could be brought back to Cheltenham. And we’ve followed the work of Charlton Kings in Bloom, including the huge effort that goes into growing vegetable plants for their annual plant sale.
Then there’s the soil.
Working with Master Composter Steve Watts, we’ve explored the world beneath our feet through a series of stories and workshops – from what makes soil healthy to the extraordinary food web of organisms living in it. We also shared the experience of Garden Organic’s allotment composting workshops, where local growers came together to learn practical ways to make better use of what they have.
Taken together, these stories have shown us that growing is about much more than producing food.
It’s about knowledge and skills, seeds and soil, wildlife and pollinators, sharing what we know, and creating places where people can grow things together. And there is already a huge amount of knowledge, enthusiasm and activity in Cheltenham.
Looking ahead
We’re now thinking about what could grow from all of this.
How can we support people to grow food in ways that work with nature? How can growers share skills, knowledge and resources
with each other? And how can allotments, gardens, community growing spaces and other places where food is grown become part of the wider tapestry of habitats across Cheltenham?
We don’t need to start from scratch. There are already people growing, experimenting, teaching, sharing and caring for places across the town.
Our next step is to help more of those people find each other, support the sharing of knowledge and explore what we might be able to make possible together.
Because growing food isn’t just about what we harvest. It’s also about soil, seeds, wildlife, skills, knowledge, people and the places where they all come together.
