Our Story
In April 2010, a group of neighbours began to dig up a patch of disused grass on a street corner in Granton, North Edinburgh. The group got to know each other through this work and began to form friendships. Word spread, and so did the friendships, and by 2012, an official urban gardening community group had formed, with funding to buy a shed and some tools, as well as to run a 12 week 'Grow your own' course in the garden. The group also held regular community meals, using produce grown by its members.
Over time, the amount of land being cultivated in Granton slowly started to expand, so that it gradually became unsurprising for street corners to be planted with crops. We even started growing some heritage Scottish wheat on street corners thanks to encouragement, advice and grain from inspirational charity: Scotland the Bread.
In Jan 2017 Granton Community Gardeners became a charity, with the aim of supporting gardening and especially anyone growing food in the area, as well as wider aims about helping our community and local environment to flourish. We started working regularly in Granton Primary School and hosting a free weekly community meal open to all. The charity tries to support and encourage anyone with a great idea to make Granton better especially if it involves making sure everyone is fed well!
In November 2017 we moved our regular community meals to Granton Parish Church Hall, and they began to run every week year-round. For many of us, our habit had previously been to eat our meals only with those very close to us, or alone. By working together (and with our amazing cooking team) we've been enjoying better food than we'd be likely to cook at home and got used to sitting and eating with neighbours. It's interesting to reflect on the effect this has on us and our community. There are now lots of kids growing up, for whom 'community meal' is part of normal life. Nobody should ever go hungry, or have to eat alone, in Granton.
In May 2018 we gained access to our big community garden. A gap site, where a building had just been demolished. With no utilities and a large desert-like expanse of compacted rubble, this was one of our biggest challenges so far. An incredible effort followed, with over 200 people getting involved in a practical way over the first few months. Within the space of a few weeks, we began getting complements for the new garden. In the winter of 2018/19, we planted over 30 fruit trees and created a series of paths. The garden remains (and hopefully always will be) a fruitful work in progress. It's a place where people come to work, learn, relax, chat, play and eat. It's now our base, where we host regular open drop-in sessions. We also host a wide range of urban gardening groups, including school children, parents and toddlers, afterschool clubs.
In 2019 a group of local residents formed Granton Chicken Cooperative, purchasing a flock of egg laying hens, and sharing responsibility for caring for them, feed costs, and rota shifts for opening up their run each morning and closing it each night. As well as eggs, the hens contribute a lot of high quality manure to the compost heaps, plus being very good at weeding and clearing slugs (just need to keep them well away from crops!).
Also in 2019, Granton Garden Bakery was launched. This grew out of 'Bread Club', a baking practice group where we worked together to see what the best bread we could bake from the flour from the wheat from our street corner plots. The aims of the bakery are to make top quality nutritious bread, and to make this available and accessible in our area (where otherwise you can only get ultra-processed supermarket bread). We need to do this at the same time as paying a baker a living wage, and we're committed to sourcing local ingredients in order to support the local food economy. We've been using a 'Pay what you can afford' model, so that you can always get bread whatever your financial situation at the time, and if you're not under money stress you're encouraged to support us.
One of the busiest and most popular parts of the community garden is our free shop. This is like a free 'charity shop', supplying donated clothes, toys, and household items free of charge to anyone who can use them. You don't need to be 'in need' to use the free shop, in our city there is too much 'stuff', we just need to get better at distributing it, so that everyone has what they need, less resources are used, we all save money, and less waste is created.
During the COVID pandemic, Granton Community Gardeners was involved with providing food for children and vulnerable people around the community.
In October 2021 we started the 'Womens Outdoor Cooking Club' in partnership with Pilton Community Health Project (who run a programme called 'Women Supporting Women'). This overlaps with our Wednesday Gardening Club open session, and so we can all eat a shared lunch together afterwards. It was a chilly time of year to start the group, but a lot of us got more used to outdoor life even in Winter during those times. This has become a regular fixture and we've had a free community lunch at the garden every Wednesday since! The gardeners grow fresh ingredients for the lunches, the cooking club take it in turns to be head chef and teach the rest of us, and make amazing food every week. These meals are open to all, free of charge, always delicious, and often the healthiest meal many of us eat during the week.
Our Advice
- The charity has grown very organically. Granton Community Gardeners didn’t set out with a plan to develop into the organisation it is today – it simply began as an urban gardening project, and by focusing on the needs and desires of local people has become a hugely successful and popular initiative.
- Making things “official” is a lot of work, but can really help with getting support for the organisation. For example becoming a registered charity in 2017, and most recently by securing funding for the community to buy the community garden at Wardieburn Road.
Our Metrics
- Attendees at regular events (community lunch, gardening club, cooking club)
- Meals distributed
- Amount of produce harvested
- Number of volunteers
