9ft In Common - The Power of Food to Bring People Together
Photographs of our Christmas Supper Club, & Farm & Feast Saturday by Sharon Cosgrove Photography.
If I’ve learnt one thing over the last 7 years of running my own business, it’s that food brings people together.
Food is uniquely placed in human’s lives. It is something that we all need on a daily basis to stay alive. This universal need connects us in a metaphorical sense across the globe, but food also has the amazing ability to bring us together in a more literal sense too.
We bring people together with food at Laurelbank Farm with our supper clubs. These are pop up events, where we publish a menu in advance, people buy tickets and everyone comes, sits round big long tables and they share a meal together. It’s all about sociable dining. There is something magical about the process of eating together – making new friends and generally having a good time. People, jointly nourishing themselves physically and perhaps spiritually nourishing too.
We bring people together with food with our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Scheme, Farm and Feast. Families sign up to join us for a whole growing season. They get weekly veg boxes collected from the farm, and weekly recipes. And our members regularly meet at the farm throughout the season for farming activities (anything from making new beds, to harvesting potatoes, making bird boxes or building bug hotels) and big family feasts. They connect with the seasons and the land, but they also connect with each other.
We also do it with our volunteers – soda farls cooked over the fire pit after every harvesting session or a hearty lunch made by Claire after our Thursday volunteering sessions.
And this year, 2024, I get to use this superpower of food in the alleyways of Belfast! I’m working with 9ftincommon.com a large-scale, city-wide collaborative investigation into the creative potential of the spaces beyond the back gate, stretching across the city from Ballyhackamore to Andersonstown, Newtownbreda to Ligoneil.
The project is part of Belfast 24 - an ambitious cultural celebration with a wide-ranging programme of creative local projects, events and city initiatives in 2024 - made by the people of Belfast, for the people of Belfast.
Here at Laurelbank farm our vision is to reconnect people to the land, and to nourish and empower people through farming and feasting. So I’ll be getting out and meeting the residents growing in the alleyways of Belfast, to find out about their successes as-well as their growing challenges.
Then for the really exciting bit…
As part of the project we will be investing in a limited number of alleyways to set-up Demonstration Food-Growing Projects.
Applications are now open so if you would like to apply check out all the details on the 9ftincommon.com website. The deadline is Friday 9th February so you’d better get going!
I hope that my own experiences on the farm will help the successful applicants to experiment with new crops and techniques, kickstart their community growing journey and set them up with the skills and knowledge to continue well beyond 2024. And most importantly perhaps, together I hope we will inspire others to set up their own food growing alleyways.
So if you are a Belfast resident with an unloved alleyway crying out to become a lush growing space, do get your application in, and I might be meeting you very soon!
Cooking soda farls over the fire with volunteers after a morning’s work on the farm.