IncredibleEdible Mytholm’s Growing Futures Field Day
Easter Saturday, March 30th
Midday to 5pm, Hebden Bridge Town Hall (Waterside Hall & Courtyard)
Fancy a Spring celebration? (Spring? Yes, it has to come soon!)
Then come along to Hebden Bridge Town Hall (please note new venue) for the launch of IncredibleEdible Mytholm’s exciting ideas for a community-owned, sustainable food business on the brownfield Mytholm Works site. We are calling this proposed business Growing Futures.
The Field Day is a chance for everyone who likes food to get together and share ideas. What would a fair and sustainable food system look like? How best to give young people working skills and knowledge about this? Can schools have an edible curriculum? How to make sure that people working in the food industry enjoy decent working conditions, earn a living wage and feel good about using their skills for the benefit of us all?
Field Day events – admission is free
Come rain or shine, kick off the day’s activities at 12 noon with Nick and apprentices from Incredible Farm, who will be planting up some apple trees in containers in the courtyard. “It’s gonna have to hail frogs to stop us planting trees!” Nick said.
We’ll be rustling up some food made from fresh local produce from 1pm, in a marquee in the courtyard. So come along and find out what the Growing Futures would mean for residents of Hebden Bridge, the Upper Calder Valley and beyond…and stir your own thoughts into the mix.
At the heart of Growing Futures, we see an intensive, permaculture food growing project, in architect-designed biomes or growing halls. These will create an attractive profile for this “gateway” site to the town.
Linking out from the permaculture food growing project, there will be:
- sustainable food education and training
- retail market/distribution centre for the growing volume of locally-produced food
- visitor attraction that builds on the Upper Calder Valleys existing draw for “veg tourism” and includes eco-themed music and arts venue and children’s nature play areas
- eco hotel and glamping site
We hope you’ll share ideas, ask questions and tell us what you think.
From 2pm to 5pm, there will also be roundtable discussions with these speakers, about:
- permaculture food growing, (Nick Green)
- sustainable food education/training and land-based employment issues (Charlie Clutterbuck)
- the wider issue of green jobs and training (Tamsin Robertson,Otesha project-tbc)
- permaculture/strawbale construction methods for Growing Futures’ buildings (Barbara Jones of Strawworks).
And enjoy some HandMadeParade art, with kids’ food-related art activities too. (Parents/carers will need to accompany their children.)
Loo alert: There are no toilets on site, sorry!
Sustainable food – skills, training and employment
Charlie Clutterbuck has been a research fellow in Food Policy at City University London since May 2003. He is on the board of the Food Ethics Council and PAN-UK the Pesticides reduction NGO. He has three farming degrees, practical experience as a farmer and he was recently appointed to Lantra’s England Council (representing the Rural & Agricultural sector of Unite the Union). Lantra is the sector skills council which is responsible for developing skills on the land.
We would like to invite local schools, colleges, parents and students to come and find out more about sustainable food education and training from Charlie Clutterbuck, and also to share information about what they’re doing already, what they’re not doing, what they’d like to do, and how Growing Futures could help support and develop their ideas, curricula and teaching/learning practices.
We can use help with:
- live music – we’re looking for volunteer acoustic musicians between 12-2pm – lunch provided!
- setting up and running food stalls during the afternoon (especially round tea time) – this would be for food groups who’d like to display and sell their food.
- anyone with ideas & resources for food-themed kids activities (CRB checked)
If you’d like to volunteer or have any questions, please email or use the contact form.
Together let’s figure out how to get from here:
Mytholm Works site
to somewhere like here:
Drawing by Ewan Tavendale