Highly commended “Apprenticeship Company of the Year
Cultivate London has had the great pleasure of working closely with Spark! Education Business Partnership for a number of years now, and last week had the opportunity to attend the Spark! Partnership Awards, held at the Holiday Inn in Brentford. The event was a celebration of the partnership work that takes place between West London schools and businesses.
Spark! organised more than 50 events and 700+ work experience placements last year, helping young people learn about the world of work and get excited about their future. Cultivate London was pleased to be able to offer a number of such work experience placements ourselves this year, and look forward to continuing to do so in the new year.
A range of awards were presented during the evening, and we were excited to be highly commended in the “Apprenticeship Company of the Year” category for our apprenticeship partnership with Wilmott Dixon. The category was won by the amazing folks over at Brompton Bicycles.
Thanks to Spark! and the Holiday Inn for putting on a great event. Congratulations to all the evening’s winners!
On November 19th Cultivate London had the great pleasure of working with a team of GlaxoSmithKline staff, who came down to our London Road site and did a fantastic job of clearing the outside of our both our polytunnels there. Cutting away a year’s worth of overgrown brambles is quite a daunting task, but the GSK team, along with the help of Cultivate London’s apprentices and trainees, made light work of it, and had fun to boot!
We are now looking foward to heading to GSK house on the 4th of December to take part in their in-house Christmas Market – a mini version of our local Brentford Market, run in partnership with the Brentford High Street Steering Group and Brentford Bikes. Open to GSK staff only we’re afraid!
Not a GSK staff member, but still want to come see us a at Christmas market? Don’t forget we are at St Faith’s Christmas Fair on Tuesday 26th November, and the Brentford Christmas market on the 15th of December.
All you Christmas Fair fans out there, make sure you don’t miss us at St Faith’s Christmas Fair on Tuesday, 26th November, 6.00 – 9.00 pm, at St Faith’s Church and Church Hall. Now in its fifth year, the fair is a popular community event with over 1,000 visitors attending last year. It promises to be a fantastic evening, and we will be there selling everything from beautiful winter flowers to hand made Christmas wreaths.
Welcome to Cultivate London’s digital newsletter! Read on for the latest news from the ground…
Cultivate London: Best Business for Apprentices and Employment for Young People
We are pleased to announce that on the 10th of October, Cultivate London was awarded a Hounslow Business Award for “Best Business for Apprentices and Employment for Young People” (try saying that 10 times fast). We were also highly commended in the “Best Green Business” category. The awards ceremony was held at the Holiday Inn at Brentford Lock, and we had a fabulous time! Thank you to everyone who was involved in putting on the event.
After many months of hard work, and with much help from teams from Rackspace Ltd, British Land and Price Waterhouse Cooper, we have finally completed work on our third site! It is just off of Brent Way, in Brentford (behind the Magpie and Crown pub, for you CAMRA folk). We are very excited about growing here, and can’t wait to get it up to full capacity in the spring. We are already harvesting kale and salad from it, and plan to grow much more there in the coming growing season. Check out this youtube video for a great little film done for us on site:
Many thanks to Vibol Moeung for putting the film together. Also, thanks must be extended to Housing Pathways, the Big Lottery Fund, the Greater London Authority Food Board and the Plunkett Foundation for providing the funding that made the building of this site possible.
Trainee Successes
A big congratulations to trainees Adam, Chris, Henry, Kyle, Tyler and Wayne who successfully completed their traineeship with us this month, after starting with us in June. After spending three months working hard on Cultivate London’s sites, they then undertook one-month long work placements as part of the program. Many thanks to Walpole Park (Ealing) and Chiswick House and Gardens for hosting these! Our guys had a wonderful time working with you.
All trainees are leaving us with an award in horticulture from Green Corridor, a qualification in health and safety and (hopefully!) some new friends and great memories! We will miss having them around, as they were a great group. Best of luck to all of them.
We are now greatly enjoying working with our autumn trainees, who will finish with us in December. We have really enjoyed working with all of our trainees this year – a bunch of fantastic people! Congratulations to you all.
Cultivate London Christmas Wreaths – Place an order, or come along to a workshop!
We are excited to announce that we will be selling beautiful, natural Christmas wreaths again this year! Created in partnership with Sunnyside Rural Trust, they will be available to order from the 1st of November. They will be custom made and ready for pick up from the 13th of December. Order forms will be going out shortly.
Would you rather make your own? We are spicing it up a little this year and for the first time will be running a wreath making workshop at the Docking Station in Brentford. The event will be held on the 13th of December, from 6 – 8pm (session 1) and 8 – 10pm (session 2). For twenty pounds only you will get to learn how to create your very own wreath, while enjoying some mince pies, hot drinks and great company. All materials provided.
Job Vacancy: General Manager
Cultivate London is sorry to announce that General Manager Adrienne Attorp will be leaving us in March to return home to pursue her career in Canada. As such, we are currently looking to hire a new General Manager.
The role is for an energetic passionate, goal-oriented person who will help Cultivate London’s dedicated team build our existing income base as well as develop our youth training programme.
If you or someone you know is interested in applying for the position and becoming part of our exciting, multi-award winning social enterprise, then head over to our website to apply. You can also check out the posting on environmentjob.co.uk.
Cultivate London Welcomes Three New Directors
We are very excited to announce that in September we elected three new members to our Board of Directors: Karen Liebrich, Sara Novakovic and Angela Rodney Evans. We are very excited to be working with them as they bring a wealth of diverse experience to the Board.
Karen is a local author and historian who is Co-founder of Abundance London, an award-winning project to harvest the seasonal glut of local fruit which would otherwise go unpicked. She is also a Special Advisor of Chelsea Fringe, and is a trustee of the Hammersmith Community Gardens Association. Last year she was awarded an MBE for services to horticulture to education.
Sara is the owner of Oliver’s Wholefood Store in Kew. She opened Oliver’s in 1989 with a desire to make organic food more accessible. Prior to doing so, she worked as a chef in a vegetarian restaurant, had a company selling fresh organic orange juice, taught dance and aerobics, and worked at the Institute for Optimum Nutrition.
Angela is a Management Consultant who has over 18 years of experience successfully planning, developing and delivering services in the fields of regeneration, employment and training, youth work, education and community engagement within the charitable and public sectors.
We are looking forward to working with them over the coming years!
COMMUNITY LINKS
Cultivate London has the great fortune of being able to collaborate with with a number of community groups and organisations around London. This month we would like to highlight teapigs, who are setting about ridding the world of terrible tea from right here in Brentford. Since starting only seven years ago (their seventh birthday is on the 1st on November!) they have grown into a hugely successful business, selling a wide range of incredibly delicious whole leaf teas to customers around the world. Adrienne is personally obsessed with their Licorice Mint.
We have been working closely with them for quite a few months now, and it has been great fun. Each week one “teapig” comes down and works with us on site for an afternoon, getting stuck in with whatever might need doing at Cultivate London on the day! They have been blogging about some of their experiences here. In addition, they supplied us with some great auction items for our fundraising dinner back in April, which was hugely appreciated. We look forward to continuing to work with them, and recommend that if you haven’t tried their tea yet, do so!
Is the thought of the drab winter season getting you down? No need to fear, simply come pay us a visit at London Farmers Markets slots Ealing and Queens Park and we will help you fight of the winter blues with some fabulous autumn and winter -flowering plants! We have some beautiful pansies, primulas and chrysanthemums on the go at the moment, and beautiful bulbs are on their way. And it is still not too late to stick in some winter veg – we still have kale and chard if yours hasn’t quite made it!
November market dates are listed below. Also, keep an eye out for us at upcoming Christmas markets at St. Faith’s Church (26th November), Brentford Market (December – TBA), and Brentford School for Girls (18th December)!
Saturday 2nd November – Ealing Market
Sunday 3rd November – Queens Park Market
Saturday 9th November – Ealing Farmers Market
Saturday 16th November – Ealing Market
Sunday 17th November – Queens Park Market
Saturday 23rd November – Ealing Market
Tuesday 26th November – St Faith’s Christmas Fair: 6 – 9pm
Organic Farmyard Manure, 50L bag (Well rotted and ready to add to beds for planting)
£6 per bag/£5 per bag, bulk buy of 5 bags or more/£4 per bag, bulk buy of 10 bags or more
Pro 50/50 potting compost, 75L bag
50% peat reduced compost for seedlings and potting of young fast growing plants. Good nutrient balance and water absorbency
£10 per bag/£9 per bag, bulk buy of 5 bags or more/£8 per bag : bulk buy of 10 bags or more
Small pots (9cm for potting on seedlings)
Pack of 100 (loose) – £3.50
Interested in any of our products? Please contact Denis Brown VIA EMAIL, call 079 0676 3908 or visit us at any of the above markets.
Volunteer With Us!
We are always looking for volunteers to come work with us. There is never a shortage of tasks to be done at either site, from sowing, planting and harvesting, to office-based tasks such as marketing, website maintenance and media relations.
If you have a few spare hours in the week and would like to come get your hands dirty at Cultivate London (either literally, at one of our sites, or figuratively, in the office), PLEASE GET IN TOUCH.
The 2013 Hounslow Business Awards in association with Barclays were held at a Gala dinner held at the Holiday Inn, Brentford Lock, on 10th October 2013. The awards were developed and organised by Prospects with the support of Hounslow Chamber of Commerce to reward and celebrate the many dynamic and innovative businesses in Hounslow.
Cultivate London was the winner in the category BEST BUSINESS FOR APPRENTICESHIPS & EMPLOYMENT FOR YOUNG PEOPLE and was highly commended in the category of BEST GREEN BUSINESS.
Cultivate London is growing full steam ahead this Spring. Our new germination table can hold over 40,000 germinating seedlings at once. Together with our propane heated germination chamber, we will grow enough seedlings to provide nearly 200 trays of potted veg, herbs and bedding flowers per week in peak season, and also enough salad to harvest 20kg a week.
In the picture above proud Head Grower Ben Simplins watches Apprentice Grower Justin Pearson put the final board in our recycled growing table.
Earlier this month, the Cultivate London team spent a few days building a poly tunnel at the Glengall Warf Garden (home of the Burgess Park Food Project) in Peckham. Not only was it great to spend time at another up-and-coming community food growing project, we really enjoyed doing the build! Our apprentices gained some new skills as well (building a tunnel is actually quite technical!), which is great. The cold weather made tightening screws a bit difficult, but all in all it was a great few days.
If your food-growing project needs some help setting up a tunnel, do let us know! We are happy to come along and build it for you, or help out with the process. To date, we’ve successfully built eight poly-tunnels, and relocated four of them!
Email Ben Simpkins, call on 075 3119 0003 or fill in the form below:
As many of you know, at the beginning of November we moved our entire Brentford Lock/Commerce Rd site approximately 300 meters west along the Grand Union Canal. This is owing to the fact that ISIS Waterside Development has begun building the next phase of their new development on the site where we were formerly. However, they have very kindly re-located us to the far end of this site, where we are now happily set up. We would like to thank ISIS for continuing to allow us to grow here – what a great space it is!
We could not have made the move without the help of a number of community volunteers, for whom we are very grateful. In particular, Mike Freely and the rest of the crew from Octink were absolutely amazing. Not only did Octink send a huge number of people over to help us shift our four poly tunnels, as well as thousands of trays of seedlings and pots of plants, they lent us a pitchfork and a truck for a couple of days as well. So to Octink, and to everyone else who helped us out, a huge THANK YOU is in order!
Now that we are set back up, we can get back to the growing. We currently have a number of beautiful winter flowers in bud, including paperwhite daffs, pansies, primulas, polyanthus and hyacinths. We are also are currently potting on a vast number of other bulbs and flowers that just waiting to spring forth in the next couple of months. If you are interested in any of these, please do not hesitate to contact Denis Bowen and place an order (denis@cultivatelondon.org or 07906763908). We will also be attending one last market for the year this coming weekend (22nd December) at West Ealing Farmers Market. We hope to see you there!
Cultivate London has scooped the Producer of the Year award in the prestigious 2012 Observer Food Monthly Awards for its high quality produce. The award was presented by Gizzi Erskine and Jay Rayner to Ben Simpkins and Sean Connor at an awards ceremony at Victoria House in London on 18th October.
We are thrilled to win this award and to be singled out by expert judges who are immensely knowledgeable about food is a great honour. Most of the young people who work on our sites are new to horticulture when they join us and this award also recognises their great efforts.
Adrienne Attorp, General Manager of Cultivate London
Now in their ninth year, the Observer Food Monthly Awards celebrate the best in British food and produce. The Producer of the Year was selected by an expert panel of judges including restaurant critic Jay Rayner, Michelin-starred chef Angela Hartnett and popular food writer Nigel Slater.
