Plants for people: polytunnel upgrades

Aim

Polytunnel upgrades to expand our edible and useful plants range.

We have a short window to improve our infrastructure before a busy early start to 2024 - our polytunnel is typically full in February. 

With your support, we will meet demand for perennial edible and useful plants. This is the first phase of this work, it's key that we get started before sowing gets underway. (Many of the perennials we grow need sowing earlier than the common annual veg).

About us

We are Earthed Up!, a small independent plant nursery specialising in edible and useful plants, quite fresh on the scene started in 2021. www.earthedup.com 

Our plant nursery is run with permaculture ethics of earth care, fair share, people care at the core and we are guided by nature. 

Earthed Up! is a not-for-profit and a workers co-operative - all decisions are made together by our 3 members. We grow peat free with no harmful chemicals. We are completely off grid, we harvest rainwater and make our own plant feed and vermicompost. 

Our carbon footprint is tiny, we avoid new plastic only using recycled pots and sell plants bareroot as well. We are starting to create our own biochar, used in our potting mix, so we can put carbon back in the ground and help our plants thrive.  

The garden is rented to us and we have taken on the second half of the garden a year ago and there is a lot of potential. Our nursery is in a hamlet just outside of Belper, in Derbyshire so we don’t get very much passing trade. Our newly launched mail order offer is helping. 

We don't take money from banks. All startup capital was loaned by individuals. If you'd like to see our accounts, they're available on the FCA mutuals public register.

Our Members

Ryan Sandford-Blackburn is a founding member of Earthed Up!. He worked for the Permaculture Association (Britain) as strategic communications coordinator for 7.5 years, with experience in strategy, events and publicising membership, courses and projects. Ryan has gardened organically for over 10 years, with a year volunteering weekly at York Unifying Multicultural Initiative and Edible York. 

Ryan is a permaculture designer and educator, passionate about perennial edibles to better meet local food and nutrition needs. He completed a Permaculture Teacher Training course this autumn. 

Carol Bladon has over 35 years experience working within the horticultural/agricultural industries. From farm worker to Head Gardener, she has developed a deep understanding of the natural world, both academically and practically.

Having gained an Honours degree in Conservation and Countryside Management, plus secondary Geography teaching qualification, Carol is inspired to share her love of the natural world. She completed her Permaculture Design Certificate in 2018 and joined Earthed Up! in February 2023, which compliments her passion for community building. 

Cristina Chapman joined as a co-op member in February 2023 with the role of sales and marketing. She has a degree in Graphic Design, specialising in Motion Graphics. 

Cristina has worked on organic gardens and helped to set up a Community Supported Agriculture scheme from scratch in Leicestershire. She has completed the Certified Soil Lab technician course through the Soil Food Web School. 

2 out of 3 members are educators and we teach educational courses in introduction to permaculture, growing perennial edibles, forest gardening and composting. We have designed and run a Soil Health Club, which is a series of short workshops all about how we can improve the health of soil. We also collaborate with other educators to share expertise. Our courses are priced fairly on a sliding scale and we offer bursary places for anyone who is facing financial barriers. 

What we want to do

Grow more plants

We need to set up more propagation and growing space in the garden, so we can expand our plant offering. We have just started selling plants by mail order so we can get more edible and useful plants to people across the UK. We need more propagation space to expand our offering and keep up with demand.

Our garden is off grid, at a fairly exposed spot; our current, basic polytunnel has taken a beating and is quite tight to get around. We'd like to reskin this and add a timber framed door. This will take time to empty, relocate the plants in coldframes

Teach more people

We also want to teach more courses to more people! Education is a vital component in our vision of helping people to regenerate the land they have stewardship over. We hope to open this up to online education courses in 2024 as well, to expand our impact further afield. We think a near-future phase will resource this but we will get started with basic resources. 

Summary

In short, we have a lot of ideas for our expansion but not the funds or infrastructure to do it. We would like to raise £1300 to get started.

We will spend this on improving our polytunnel and to pay for our time putting it up. We will also invest in further developments for our education offering. We reinvest all of our profit into paying workers, growing gardens, and creating habitats for nature to thrive.  

There is so much potential for our growth and impact and we are excited and raring to go! 

Please can you help us achieve our goals quicker? We will be so grateful. Thank you for your donations!

Budget

£1300

£540 7 days workers' time at £11/hr: to create coldframe panels, reskin existing polytunnel and make and fit timber door frame.

£100 New polytunnel skin with long guarantee 

£200 Learning space equipment e.g. clock, seating, secondhand tarp for shelter, chalkboards and easel

£200 18 hours worker time at £11/hr: to make new potting benches from reclaimed timber 

£200 Garden equipment: wheelbarrow, watering cans, thermometer

£60 Estimated Crowdfunder Transaction fees. Charged at 2.4% +£0.20 +VAT per transaction.

This project successfully funded on 14th December 2023