Hackney salad's journey from organic seed to nutritious salad bag: check out this wonderful film made by our former trainee Warami.
Are you a restaurant, cafe or shop owner in East London who would like to serve fresh, local, seasonal, organic salad leaves or other produce? Contact our Hackney grower Sophie or Dagenham grower Alice to see what's available and how we might work together.
We grow Hackney Salad on our Patchwork Farm, made up of four small market gardens in Clissold Park, Springfield Park, Allens Gardens and Stellman Close - all in Hackney, North London. We also have Dagenham Farm in East London.
All our growing space is certified by the Soil Association - ours was the first organically certified food-growing land in London. In Hackney, we specialise in salad leaves. In Dagenham, we grow a far greater range of produce. Both farms also train new growers.
Salad production is labour intensive and the leaves are nutritious but highly perishable - therefore it makes sense to grow salad as close to where it's eaten as possible. The wide variety of salad leaves we grow enables us to practice crop rotation, just one element of the organic practices we follow on our sites.
In addition, salad leaves are a high-value crop, so that gives us a greater chance of making the whole thing work financially.
