Using Perennials in CSAs and Market Gardens – Webinar Recorded 30 November 2022
Date Published: 25th October 2022
About this event
Join Mandy Barber of Incredible Vegetables and Ryan Sandford-Blackburn of Earthed Up! to explore the potential of perennials.
We will look at the benefits, which species may make sense, perennials for seed crops, integration into an annual layout and use at the edges.
After watching this recording, you should know how to add delicious perennial crops to your design, reducing inputs and increasing climate resilience.
About our speakers
Mandy Barber is one of the team of two who set up and manages Incredible Vegetables, an experimental vegetable growing project, nursery and research space dedicated to useful perennial edibles and future food crops. The polyculture space includes a biodiverse mixture of perennials, self-sowing annuals and plants for pollinators. Over the last ten years, it has evolved into a significant botanical reserve of important perennial food crops, protecting them for the future, many of which we will all need to rely on in years to come. They undertake small plant breeding projects, for example, with a Hopniss (Apios americana) trial currently underway. They now have a second site at Baddaford Farm, a few miles from our main site, where we raise our nursery plants and produce our seeds.
The research they are doing is absolutely essential. Mixed plantings of perennial crops and woody shrubs not only safeguard and enrich soil ecosystems but help to draw down and store carbon from the atmosphere, a vital function to help combat climate change.
Ryan Sandford-Blackburn is a founding member of Earthed Up! Edible and useful plants nursery, a workers’ co-operative based in Belper, Derbyshire. Ryan produces plants and grows gardens, as well as teaching permaculture design and forest gardening. He worked at the Permaculture Association for 8 years, discovering many amazing people and projects across the network.
ABOUT THE WEBINAR PROGRAMME
This webinar is a partnership between the CSA Network UK, the Seed Sovereignty Programme run by the Gaia Foundation, and the Organic Growers Alliance. It forms part of a webinar series funded by Farming the Future.
The webinar programme focuses on practical teaching and farmer-to-farmer knowledge exchanges from farmers and growers from around the UK. The series is designed to increase knowledge exchange and learning on both the politics and practice of agroecology, seed sovereignty and food sovereignty.
If you would like to be involved in running a webinar, a theme or practice you would would like to know more about, or have a specific topic you would like to present on please get in touch with us at hello@organicgrowersalliance.co.uk.
You can download the presentation slideshow here.
If you aren’t part of any of the organisations running this programme but would like to sign as a member up please check us out at:
Seed Sovereignty Programme (for growers interested in saving and producing seed) www.seedsovereignty.info
Organic Growers Alliance: (for market gardens and vegetable farms)www.organicgrowersalliance.co.ukCSA Network UK: (For community supported agriculture schemes) www.communitysupportedagriculture.org.uk