Plants
Photo Credit: Christian Cassiel
In the growing season of 2023, I joined the team at Folx Farm in Winchelsea as they moved their growing enterprise from outer London to the countryside of East Sussex. We grow a range of crops within 5 acres of field, glasshouse and polytunnel - from aubergines to radicchio, tomatillos to agretti to supply restaurants and veg boxes.
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In 2016, I completed the Growing Communities trainee growers program then went on to work as a Patchwork Farmer, growing salad leaves for their award-winning Hackney Salad on a certified organic site in Stoke Newington. Growing Communities is a social enterprise that supports small scale sustainable farmers and helps communities take back control of their food by providing a real alternative to the current food system. At the same time, I worked as a school gardener teaching food growing in primary schools and running workshops in community growing spaces.
For Spring / Summer 2018, I relocated to Wiltshire where I worked on an organic vegetable farm growing produce for farmers markets and wholesale. I then moved on to volunteering at a Buddhist Retreat Centre where amongst a number of DIY and maintenance jobs, I worked to reclaim a vegetable patch that has not been used for some time by clearing, weeding and introducing green manures to improve the soil - a huge challenge in a heatwave.
For the 2019 growing season, I returned to grow organic salad on a Growing Communities micro-site near the Hackney Marshes for their Veg Bag Scheme. I also set up a growing space through Organiclea’s Farm Start Program using a Chef-Supported Agriculture model. The site is based at the Wolves Lane Nursery in Haringey and all the produce - including tromboncino courgettes, heritage tomatoes, chillies and climbing french beans - was grown for Ottolenghi’s plant-focused restaurant, Rovi.
Having moved out of London to the East Sussex countryside at the end of 2019, I primarily focused on writing and speaking about how I approach growing a diverse range of edible plants on my small-scale plot as well as exploring the ways in which food growing intersects with colonialism, environmentalism and the climate crisis, both historically and into the present day.
In 2022, I organised and facilitated a series of three weekend retreats for BPOC growers and landworkers at Ragman’s Lane Farm in the Gloucestershire countryside.
