Edinburgh Community Food has teamed up with Veg Power UK again to deliver the Growing to Love project (formerly Grow Strong) across Edinburgh to get children interested and learning all about growing food to eat.

"There is nothing like seeing the miracle of a tiny seed emerge from the soil, grow, bloom and produce fresh food.  When you have grown once, you will want to grow for a lifetime.  Knowing how to grow food is not just amazing fun, it's also a life skill and one our children should not be without." Chris Collins

Learning all about how we grow food is not just good for children in terms of encouraging healthy eating, it’s important to develop their understanding of the food chain, sustainability and our environment. Children learn by getting stuck in and getting their hands dirty! Getting involved in growing projects is ideal for their development.

Most of our children are not eating enough vegetables – we want to work towards changing this.

Planning is underway for Growing to Love 2024 - it's going to be bigger and more exciting than ever!  Read about Growing to Love 2023 here.

What the teachers thought

“It gave us the resources to allow a large number of children to grow a plant and take it home.  It also gave us the sufficient fruit to harvest and cook with entire school of 12 classes.  It would’ve been a much more scaled back version if we hadn’t been involved in Grow Strong and cooking wouldn’t have happened at all.  It really snowballed and grew legs.”  Carrick Knowe Primary School Outdoor Learning Teacher

“In P1 and P2 classes, growing things and living things are always covered in summer term.  There are lots of outcomes around that understanding so the project slotted in just perfectly with what they were doing at the time.” Broughton Primary School Sustainability Lead

5 stars for 'Sparking an interest in vegetables and growing'

5 stars for 'How enjoyable did the children find the project'

Project Launch

We were thrilled to be invited to Jock Tamson's Gairden to launch the project with a P6 class from Parson's Green Primary who were sowing their tomato seeds and getting an expert lesson from the fabulous Lizz Spence.

Watch the Edinburgh Evening News coverage of the launch here. 

  

  

Repotting

We had great fun helping the Primary 2 class at Liberton Primary School repot their tomato plants. We used old drinks bottles, yoghurt tubs and milk jugs as pots.  This part of the growing process helps children learn skills, patience and responsibility. Opportunities like this provide interaction with food which further encourages them to eat a larger variety of food. The children took their tomato plants home to care for them over the summer holidays!

You can read about our morning at Liberton Primary School here.

 

Watch what we got up to here:

At the start of the new school term in August 2022, the tomatoes were harvested and children had the chance to cook a tomato sauce with their produce and recycle a jar or container, designing their own label for the sauce too. 

The final stage...cooking with our delicious homegrown tomatoes!

We were delighted to host Broughton Primary School at the Edinburgh Community Food warehouse for the final stage of the project. Our little chefs brought in their homegrown tomatoes and helped Jeff Bland and George Mcivor of Masterchefs of Great Britain prepare courgettes, carrots and celery and extra tomatoes to create a delicious tomato sauce to go with pasta. A huge thank you to all who came along.

We even made the STV news...

All the families benefitting from our pioneering Discover! project, in collaboration with City of Edinburgh Council, took part too and received individual grow packs and grew their tomatoes at home.