Learning Where Food Comes From 🌱🍎🥔

We absolutely love teaching children and young people where their food comes from and giving them hands-on experiences with growing, harvesting, and cooking real food.

In the spring, we planted potatoes together, and by autumn it was finally time to harvest them. The excitement was incredible! Each single potato had grown into five to ten new potatoes, and the children loved digging them up, discovering what was hiding beneath the soil.

This year our apple tree has also been incredibly generous. It produced so many apples that we had more than enough for apple pies, apple sauce, and stewed apples. On top of that, we are surrounded by blackberry bushes – free, nutritious food wherever we turn. Nature truly provides when we take the time to notice it.

Together, we made a delicious apple crumble, and one of the parents said:

“This is the best apple crumble I have ever tasted.”

The secret? High-quality, real ingredients.The topping was made with real butter (no cheap processed margarine), unrefined cane sugar, cinnamon, and organic spelt flour. The base was freshly picked blackberries and the sweetest apples from our own tree. No added sugar was needed at all – these apples were naturally sweet, far sweeter and more flavourful than most apples from the shop.

One of the teenagers asked a brilliant question:

“Why don’t they sell apples like this in the shops?”

I explained that many apple varieties are incredibly sweet and delicious but don’t last very long. Just a couple of days after being picked, some begin to soften or rot. Shops need apples that can travel long distances and sit on shelves for weeks, so flavour is often sacrificed for shelf life. That’s why tasting sun-ripened, freshly picked food is such a special experience.

Moments like these show how powerful food education can be. We encourage families to grow food at home where possible, even if it’s just one plant or a small tree, and to make use of the free food nature offers around us.

A huge thank you to Hinkley Point Community Fund for funding our healthy eating project and supporting families in Bridgwater to grow food at home, reconnect with nature, and enjoy real, nourishing ingredients.

Together, we’re planting seeds – not just in the soil, but for lifelong healthy habits. 🌿💚