"Great oaks from little acorns grow..."

The Wincanton Patch is a small area of green space nestled behind Wincanton high-street with big plans to become a thriving community food-growing space, where people can come together to learn how to grow food sustainably and eat healthily. It is one of the first iterations of the Community Patch Project, a long-term project with ambitions to radically transform the local food systems in Wincanton and beyond by re-rooting the community in traditions of food growing, providing fresh and healthy food to the local residents of Wincanton, and by returning power to the local people. We believe that issues of food sovereignty (the right to grow and eat your own food), 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 town has the potential to make big impacts across the food system.

The Wincanton Patch committee, a small group made up of residents of Wincanton, local growers, and campaigners, have secured a small patch of land above the old nursing home just off Lock’s Lane. The Town Council will be renting the site to us so we can set up and run our community growing patch. We hope to welcome volunteers to help us grow food and keep up with the general maintenance. The produce grown will go to volunteers, with surplus being sold at Cole’s Yard and any profits going back into helping run the project.

Setting up a market garden on this scale (just under an acre) can be very expensive, so alongside applying for grants, we are setting up this fundraiser to help us get equipment like seed propagation trays, membrane for insect protection, fleece for frost protection, compost to start our no-dig beds, etc.

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 (£700); seeds (£200), seed trays (£200), irrigation pipes (£200), polytunnel (£1000), timber for raised beds (£500), mesh and fleece (£200). 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 wincanton@communitypatch.co.uk.

If you would like to donate to us on a monthly basis, you can sponsor a seed with us! Email us at the above address for more information.