Growing fruits, making juice and developing community links

A 7 acre diverse site with homestead, Sitka spruce plantation under renovation and bogland.

Barmolloch Cottages is a scenic farm offering cottages with accommodation for 18, on-site biodynamic gardening, health and wellbeing opportunities and a bespoke Barn course venue.

We are a 25 year old housing cooperative who manage our 50acres of land from an ecological perspective. We have woodlands, wetlands, grasslands and gardens. We regularly host workshops, events and volunteers.

We are also connected to the Talamh Life Centre.

We are situated right by the sea in a small hamlet, Tangleha, in Tangleha House. Here we have a large open studio space, quest accommodation and a small forest garden.

Since 2009 we have been renovating the house to make it more energy efficient and we are also establishing food forests in the adjoining land. We have an edible plant nursery, supplying gardens and unfarmed land in the surrounding local area. This is added to with all profits from the Collective being used to purchase more edible perennial plants.

We host courses and regularly accept volunteers to stay with us and help out with our Permaculture design and implementation. We have also established an outdoor education business, Embark Nature School, which we run from a local woodland that we help to maintain and from a beach on the local St Cyrus National Nature Reserve.

We also organise events from green woodworking and skill shares to permaculture design and eco-building. We participate in the development of different projects around the U.K. and Europe, including music festivals, farms, gardens, nature reserves and buildings.

We are an Edinburgh based herbal medicine workers’ co-operative whose central philosophy is that herbal medicine is the medicine of the people and should be accessible to everyone, and practised in an ecologically responsible way. We offer a series of practical courses and workshops, run the low cost Wester Hailes Community Herbal Medicine Clinic, a private clinic in Granton, the Blackford Glen Medicine Garden, and produce simple resources to enable folks to practice herbalism at home.
Since 2015 we have been running a community wide project in Wester Hailes, South West Edinburgh - we run a weekly herbal clinic in an integrated NHS & Edinburgh Council Health Centre, and alongside the clinic offer free workshops on foraging, herb growing & medicine making. From spring 2018 we have been running our Communitea project - a multi-site satellite approach to growing medicinal herbs on a community scale to be turned into herbal tea blends for distribution across the neighbourhood.
We are aiming to 'close the circle' with our medicine  - produce the medicine in the community for use by the community. Our work hopes to be an example of social & ecological permaculture principles in action on a community scale.

Read Woodside Arran's first blog entry here.

The ideas behind Comrie Croft were inspired by a hand drawn map from the 1700s showing up to 12 households living on and working the land. By the early 1990s the farm could no longer support one family and it looked like it would be amalgamated into a larger land holding and the buildings converted into executive housing.

But why should the story of rural areas be one of constant decline? We believe that rural areas can and should be resilient, vibrant places with abundant nature, where everyone can live well within an equitable share of the earth's resources. This is what we are attempting to demonstrate at Comrie Croft.

The Croft is set up as a private company co-owned by 50 employees, local people, friends and family. It was established in 2008 to buy out the previous land owner and pursue the new vision. Finance was raised through the co-owners and a large bank loan from Triodos Bank, who have supported the project from the outset.

Some of the enterprises at the Croft are independently owned and managed - Tomnah'a Market Garden and the Tea Garden at Comrie Croft being the most notable. Tomnah'a (est. 2016) operates on a Community Supported Agriculture model, leasing a 3 ha field within from which they grow a wide range of fruit, veg and flowers. Sales are made direct to local people through a veg-box scheme, flower club, local markets/food assembly and weddings. Produce is also sold wholesale to the onsite farmshop, cafe and local chefs/restaurants. The Tea Garden Cafe serves a range of homemade and 'field to fork' salads, soups, cakes and other goodies.

• foster reflection on the interconnectedness of healthy eco-systems
• generate research into humankind’s relationship with nature
• through natural philosophical narratives linking technology and nature, and via an ancient-futures perspective (Norberg-Hodge) - develop inspiring, playful, empirical, sustainable actions and experiences that benefit mind, body and the environment.

To demonstrate sustainable and productive agricultural site using permaculture to maximise the yield both in terms of production but also as an aesthtically pleasing, calm place to be.

Read Netherton Farm's first blog post here.