The last week in June and first week in July saw over 600 local school children descend on Stockbridge. These single visits are aimed at schools across Yorkshire who would not be able to visit STC as part of our other school projects due to distance.

Food Live saw children harvesting strawberries, new potatoes, lettuce, radish, courgettes and broccoli to take home. They also had a tour of the glasshouses and picked mini plum tomatoes and cherry to taste plus hearing about how cucumbers are grown. All children also went away with a punnet of cherry tomatoes donated by English Village Salads. In addition to harvesting the fresh produce they also made butter, milked a cow (wooden!), cooked healthy pizzas and carrot cake buns. On the first 2 days they also learned about Biofuels from staff at the Novel Non Food Crop Centre at York.

The Big Harvest also involved children harvesting crops plus 7 groups cooking on the Yorkshire Forward Cooking Bus. The Cooking Bus is a fantastic resource for the region and the third time that it has been to STC. The children cooked with the produce harvested in the field and shown how to handle knives safely in the kitchen. This was followed by a fruit taste challenge to see if they could identify all the fruit put in front of them, talk about seasonality and to see how far some fruit has to travel to get on the supermarket shelves. The event was aimed at getting children interested in growing their own produce and hopefully we have started this journey.