"Great oaks from little acorns grow..."

The Redlynch Patch is a field just over three acres located opposite Redlynch Chapel. Over the next few years we have big plans to turn it into a productive market garden to provide local, healthy, and sustainably grown produce to local residents of Redlynch and beyond. Redlynch Patch is one of two patches that make up the Community Patch Project, a recently formed community organisation with ambitions to radically transform the local food systems in Redlynch and surrounding areas (Wincanton, Bruton, Castle Cary, etc) by re-rooting the community in traditions of food growing, providing fresh and healthy food to local residents, and by returning power to the local people. We believe that issues of food sovereignty, protection and enhancement of biodiversity, and building community resilience are all interlinked, and that starting on a small patch of land in a rural Somerset village has the potential to make big impacts across the food system.

We hope to welcome volunteers to help us grow food and keep up with the general maintenance of the site. The produce grown will go to volunteers, with surplus being sold on a pay-as-you-feel basis to residents and passers-by, with any profits going back into helping run the project. We hope to grow all kinds of vegetables, heritage fruit trees, and cut flowers.

Setting up a market garden on this scale can be expensive, so we are hoping you can help us to raise enough for us to buy all the starting equipment (compost, polytunnels, tools, market gardening furniture, seed trays and seeds, and lots more!).

We are aiming to raise £3000 with the help of generous folk like you, so that we can grow delicious food to give back to our wonderful community. Please help us by donating whatever you can to our fundraiser - every little bit helps to grow the food revolution!

Here is a rough breakdown of what we're hoping to buy with our funds: compost (£900), seed trays (£200), polytunnel (£1500), and timber for building (£400). The more we get, the more we can grow!

More information about the Community Patch Project

For decades the UK's food system has been dominated by big agribusinesses, mega-corporations, and supermarkets, with a focus on profit at any cost. This leads to an actively harmful disregard for the food system as a whole, and for the individual aspects that make up the food system too (the soil, the growers and farmers, the processors, and the sellers). This creates multiple interlinked crises within the system: the degradation of soil to the extent that it has been estimated that the UK has only 30-40 years of harvests left before the eradication of soil fertility; a huge lack of access to good, healthy food (whether that be due to the price of good quality food, ‘food deserts’, lack of education around eating healthily, or highly processed foods sold by supermarkets); shockingly high amounts of waste at every stage of the food system; low-wages for food workers at every stage, especially the constant exploitation of farmers and growers; and an overall disconnection from the food that lands on our plate, taking away a huge part of our cultural heritage and community resilience.

The Community Patch Project is an initiative started by a small group of growers, campaigners, and activists who want to help fight for global change to the food system on a local level. The idea is to set up community growing projects, or ‘patches’, in villages and towns in the local area (Wincanton, Redlynch, Bruton, Castle Cary, etc) to create a patchwork of projects providing fresh, healthy fruit and veg to the community. If you are interested in getting involved, please email us at redlynch@communitypatch.co.uk.

If you would like to sponsor a tree for a one-off payment of £20, please email us at the address above and we'll send information on how to do this.