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Camau Gwyrdd is a National Lottery Funded project delivered by Social Farms & Gardens from 2023 – 2026. The programme supports community growing spaces to engage a broader demographic of their local community in activity that will build resilience in the face of our climate and nature emergencies. Read about one of our champion projects, Gwynfe Growers below:
Gwynfe Growers is a small, community supported market garden, nestled in the Western hills of Bannau Brycheiniog. Since 2022 we’ve been selling fresh, organic veg direct from the farm gate, and via a CSA veg box. Our tiny rural village is at first glance an odd place for a market garden - a traditional farming community of perhaps 100 households, scattered over several miles of hillside, predominantly older, Welsh speaking. Not your typical CSA demographic!
However, the area has a history, dimly remembered, of community food production. Walled gardens once lined the route workers took up to the quarries, tended communally and harvested from on the way back home. Older residents remember their parents talking about getting all their food from the farm or village “except salt and tomato ketchup”! Today this still shows in the large number of hobby gardeners.
We would love to see the community return to providing for itself, growing and buying locally, and so, supported by Social Farms & Gardens, we decided to run a series of events showcasing local food.
Through the growing season we hosted 11 “Crop Swap & Share” mornings in the village hall. We were able to bring a variety of crops from the farm to ensure the sharing table was well stocked, and encouraged visitors to take items even if they didn’t have anything to “swap”. Tea, coffee & cake were also provided so that people could stick around and chat with neighbours.
Then, at the end of the season we ran a “Fferm i Fforc” harvest feast, also at the village hall, for 50 attendees - cooking 14 different dishes from ingredients produced within an hour of Gwynfe as a celebration of what is grown and produced in the area.
The engagement was fantastic - with 105 unique visitors across the events (a very large % of the local population!), including 62 who had never had any engagement with us as Gwynfe Growers. People brought all sorts of surplus harvests to share, and found motivation to grow more in 2025, knowing that no abundance would be wasted. We raised over £600 in donations, which means we can run the Crop Swap & Share events again in 2025.
But the most exciting results come from conversations about what we can do as a community to produce more of our own food. We have partnered with a local farmer to launch a 20 share potato CSA that was fully subscribed within a week of announcement. Should this prove successful, there is a wider plan for a larger area to be grown in future years, and diversification into other community crops (pumpkins, grain & sunflowers). A second farmer has donated a small field to plant a community orchard for juice and cider making. Old equipment - potato lifters, seeders, presses and the like - are being dug out of old barns and restored.
There’s a feeling of excitement, of something being rediscovered - perhaps in a few years we’ll be back to producing everything in the village, including the tomato ketchup!