WildFarming

For our first Wild City Lab, we’ll be joined by grower Jack Peppiatt, bringing knowledge and experience developed through his time at Birch Farm in Devon.

We’ll spend the morning in the Wild City Studio exploring alternative approaches to growing food. Jack will take us through natural farming techniques, working with weeds, perennial vegetables, diverse plant communities and the principles of designing complex woody ecosystems. We’ll also explore the principles of syntropy and whether they can be adapted to an urban environment, looking at how plants can work together to create productive, resilient and interconnected growing systems.

Wild City will bring those ideas into an urban context, exploring food forests, perennial growing and our own experiments at Markfield Community Garden, as well as how these principles can translate into smaller urban spaces and private gardens.

After lunch, we’ll head outside.

Using Markfield Community Garden as our living laboratory, we’ll look at what’s already growing, what has worked, what hasn’t, and what the site can teach us.

Then we’ll put the theory into practice.

Together, we’ll establish a new productive planting area using plants supplied for the day, combining ideas from food forestry, polycultures and syntropic growing to create a system that can develop into next year and beyond.

This isn’t about following a fixed recipe. It’s about learning to read a place, understand relationships between plants and work with natural processes rather than constantly fighting them.

Morning in the studio. Afternoon in the soil.

Learn something. Make it real.