Partners and Projects
Mapping
We are collecting data for a number of different mapping projects. These include Falling Fruit, the global foraging map, the People’s Trust for Endangered Species Traditional Orchard Survey and the Local Environmental Records Centre Wales using the LERC phone app. Anyone can add to these mapping projects, check them out and see if there’s one you can contribute to. The more people that add to them, the better they become.
Our principal distributor is FareShare Cymru. They are the Cardiff-based branch of the national charity that collects surplus food, mainly from farms and supermarkets, and delivers it to food banks and other food sharing initiatives. FareShare Cymru collects and distributes food twice a week in Swansea.
Growing Real Food For Nutrition (GRFFN)
We are working with GRFFN to survey the nutrient density of the fruit we pick at each site so we can compare fruit from different sites and monitor how their nutritional value changes over the coming years.
We tend to assume that all apples are more or less nutritionally identical, with perhaps some variation caused by differences in variety or growing method e.g. conventional or organic. Plus we think that these nutritional values are fixed. Both of these assumptions are actually incorrect. There are, infact, large nutritional variations among similar crops that are caused by differences in the soils in which they’ve been grown. Since the nutrient density of a crop indicates the health of the soil, it is important to adopt regenerative growing methods that improve soil health, which in-turn produce high quality, nutrient dense crops. Grffn is keen for fruit growers in Swansea to join their journey learning how to grow and measure nutrient dense food. Elizabeth Westaway, one of the founders of Grffn lives in Swansea.