Climate Friendly Food

Market gardening course

The weekend of January 23rd and 24th saw Climate Friendly Food run its first weekend course in market gardening. The course was a pilot of an AQA Unit Award we are awaiting to be scrutinised by the exam body.

The course was well received as we started by looking at soil fertility and properties, through weeds, pest and diseases and key horticultural skills like sowing for transplants, seed drills and transplanting. We also looked in depth at undersowing green manures in the first week of July as catch green manuring is important for increasing soil carbon.

We also looked at the issues with health and safety with hand tools including a risk assessment created by the Health & Safety Executive. The section where we did a muscle warm up was treated as light hearted and fun but everyone agreed that they would do this in future. Whilst the course did not attempt to do machinery skills we looked at the processes to create a seedbed when turning in a green manure and the mantra "mow, plough, cultivate, roll" is probably still ringing in the heads of the participants.

The first day finished with a multiple choice assessment where nearly everyone got full marks. The second day was definitely more indepth and it started by attributing 40 crops to their vegetable families. From this we looked at the skills of successional sowing, season extension and winter storage techniques. We then enjoyed getting outdoors and had a good look at our host Debbie Ellen's vegetable plots where she had a few winter salads growing in the greenhouse.

In the afternoon we went back to some of the more nuts and bolts part of market gardening including looking at record keeping, certification and marketing. The second day involved more discussions and particularly looked as to where the participants were at with regards their own market gardening projects. There is definitely change happening in Manchester supported by organisations like the Kindling Trust's "How will Manchester feed itself", from one market garden two years ago to four this year.

Climate Friendly Food would like to thank Debbie Ellen and Seymour Road Allotments for their generous support and for providing the pavillion free of charge.