The London Harvest Festival is 22 in September! To celebrate, we are inviting the world to participate in the buzzing life of London’s city farm and garden community by going online. Over the weekend of September 19th – 20th, the public get the opportunity to join in with a variety of live harvest festival activities including animal shows, competitive fruit-and-veg displays, craft-a-longs, cook-a-longs, miniature garden-making, photography, and an online fireside evening celebration.
Participants will have special access to exclusive films and podcasts made by farm and garden staff and volunteers. They’ll get to know London’s rare-breed pigs, tiny cows, Golden Guernsey goats, confident chickens, miniature donkeys, huge horses and flocks of sheep, as well as our most welcoming gardens and pleasant plants, and of course the people who run, volunteer at, and visit London’s farms and community gardens, including a few famous faces.
There are thirteen city farms and many hundreds of community gardens in the capital. Normally open and free-to-access for the public, Covid-19 meant many have had to shut their doors for safety reasons and to focus on emergency response. However, plants do not stop growing and animals do not stop needing to be fed, so while the gates may have been shut, the work behind the gates continued, and in many cases increased.
The London Harvest Festival has always been a celebration of the work done by these vital green spaces that provide nature, tranquillity, and community to offset the hectic lives led by many Londoners. At the festival we showcase the work of the city farm and community garden movement, career development for young people, horticultural therapy, services to vulnerable Londoners, and the value to every one of our unique natural, cultural, inclusive spaces.
Coinciding with Open Farms Sunday, the London Harvest Festival is free and open to all. We’ll have a ticket system to help people feel part of something both big and cosy. Those that can make it along to a farm or garden physically will find lots to do and a warm welcome too.
The London Harvest Festival is organised by The London Association of City Farms and Community Gardens, a sibling charity of Social Farms & Gardens. Funding for the event comes from The City Bridge Trust, Awards for All, and the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association. Farms and gardens are able to take part due to the generosity of their individual donors, who recognise the social value of farms and gardens.
The online version of the festival is supported by London Funders generous fund to help London’s community charities adapt to coronavirus. As well as reaching people to include them in the online event, the organisers hope the Online London Harvest Festival will raise the profile and income of city farms and community gardens, as these spaces become increasingly important to quality of life for city people.
