The Wolves Lane Salad Share comes to an end

Dear Wolves Lane Salad Sharer, 

The time has come! This is the last week of the Salad Share before our Winter pause. There will be no bags for collection next Thursday 22nd October. We will still have some fresh produce available to buy from our shop on Fridays and Sundays, so do come down for this.

We'd like to say a warm thank you to those of you who have been collecting a bag of fresh, Wolves Lane grown produce from us every week since April. 

Since April, we have supplied over 40 local households with food grown on site at Wolves Lane using chemical free, agroecological growing methods. We have harvested, packed and distributed over 400 Salad Bags, that have included over 25 varieties of produce. Since 98% of food consumed in London is imported from outside the city, this is a meaningful start to having more Londoners eating nutrient-dense, locally grown produce - and a much needed step toward building local food security. 

We had so much fun filling bags with treats like rhubarb, radishes, spring garlic, cucamelons, tomatoes, and at least 10 different herbs. More recently we hope people have enjoyed the chillies, tea blends and tomatillos as much as we did!

To be honest, it was a hard summer for our team. Temperatures in the glasshouse regularly reached above 50℃, which made for some very early dawn starts to avoid the heat. Over 50 days of consecutive drought meant a lot of manual watering on our outdoor beds, and many of our crops did not make it. This certainly made us more determined to do our best as growers to strengthen local food supplies for our community. 

On the bright side, we did have some heroic plant successes! We'd like to shout out agretti (a plant native to the coastal marshes of the Mediterranean) and New Zealand spinach in particular - salad crops that always pulled through when we needed them. This is not to overlook the other leaves that starred in the 100g bags of salad - shiso, purslane, rainbow chard, dill, spinach, tatsoi and mizuna - just to name a few. Our cucamelons and chillies have also been showstoppers. 

As the season draws to a close, we're saving seed from the crops that did particularly well, and you can expect their reappearance next year. 

Our overall highlight was the Community Harvest Feast that we had the pleasure of cooking for our Salad Share customers in September. It was such a joy to meet everyone who supported us through the season, and to spend a day with our chef hats on cooking up our own produce! Thank you to everyone who came and shared food with us, and well done to those who correctly guessed the weight of the vegetable.

Over the mid-winter, we will be reflecting on this season and planning the next. We will be in touch with details of the Salad Share relaunch and how to sign up in early 2027. Please get in touch if you have any feedback - it's been very lovely and helpful hearing the thoughts shared with us so far.

With warmth and solidarity,

The Wolves Lane Growers - Sofia, Ibby, Ayo, Liam and Jojo