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| 16 Sep 2012 | . Essential Trading's Open Day | |
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With great pleasure, Alara is getting ready to attend (and partake in!) the bi-annual Essential Trading Open Day for the independent health food trade on Sunday September 16. This annual event will be particularly special this year as the celebration marks the finale of Essential’s 40th Anniversary Year.
A big hurrah for organic & fairtrade wholesalers everywhere!
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| 15 Sep 2012 | Alara's Open Day with Capital Growth | | On 15th September Capital Growth Edible has arranged a Garden Open Day. Alara really hopes this year can be the biggest Edible Garden Open Day EVER!
So, to show our support you can visit the Alara grounds and we'll be throwing open our shrub-covered doors to the general public. You will be able to visit two sites (listed below) that will have your green fingers glowing...
You are also very welcome to visit our Dream Farm and see the 'fruits' of our labour, including gooseberries, goji berries, Japanese Wine Berries, apples as well as artichokes, asparagus and more!
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| 30 Jul 2012 | Alara's Homegrown Goji Berry | |
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Here is the first ripe Goji berry from our gardens this year. It tasted great! We hope to have enough to dry and include in a special edition muesli later in the season.
All our goji bushes are grown from the dried fruit that we blend into ...Alara cereals. Has anyone else planted their breakfast? Though delicious, resist eating a few of these red berries, pick them from your breakfast bowl, plant and grow these super fruits yourself.
Alara muesli; Living Food leads to Thriving Lives.
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| 27 Mar 2011 | Celebrating Isis, Quantum Jazz Biology*Medicine*Art | |
An event organised by the Institute of Science in Society.
Lectures, musical performances, art exhibitions, urban forest garden, organic reception and dinner.
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| 6 Nov 2010 | Apple Day | |
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This is the last apple left on the oldest apple tree and it was picked today.
Altogether we have twenty-eight apple trees on dream farm with 12 different varieties. Twenty seven we have planted and all these have names however this oldest of the trees is Un-named. It started growing about twenty-five years ago from an apple core, probably thrown down the railway embankment from a passing train. It is not grafted like the others here and, as with all apples, is not the same variety as its parent but a cross.
Most of the trees gave some fruit this year however the Un-named tree produced hundreds of beautiful golden red apples, as it has done for the last few years. We have been eating them; juicing them and making apple crumble with them and everything has been delicious.
It is amazing that this Un-named tree, unloved, uncared for, growing on wasteland from discarded rubbish can bestow such blessing so freely year after year.
As I eat this apple and think back on the long history of apples and the central part they have played in our mythology it seems strange that my last post was on worms. It reinforces the link with both the beginnings of life and with death that is found in a garden and how with self-consciousness comes knowledge of mortality; good news and bad news that needs integration.
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| 12 Oct 2010 | Building a wormery for 10-10-10 | |
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On Sunday 10th of October 2010 it was 10-10-10 and across the world thousands of activities were taking place aimed at reducing climate change emissions by 10% in 2010. More details at http://www.1010global.org/uk At Dream Farm we decided to build a wormery
The goal is that as the worm numbers build up it will process all the kitchen scraps from the canteen, about a kilo a day. At the moment these scraps go to an anaerobic digester and have to travel by lorry to get there. We also have to pay to get them taken away and we lose all the nutrient value in Dream farm of the worm casts and worm tea so this seems like a great idea. It is an interesting chain of thought that the plant food in good topsoil is really worm casts. All plants need to grow is plant food, water, air and sunlight, and as we are made from the food we eat, we are actually made (once or in the case of meat, twice removed) from worm casts, water and air.
We had a small wormery before, unfortunately it got very cold last winter and all the worms froze so this time we have converted a small garden shed to make sure the worms stay warm Everything that went to build this wormery was thrown away including the shed which needed new doors, a new roof and new windows. There is a kilo of worms on the way through the post and I am really looking forward to introducing them to their new home.
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| 28 Sep 2010 | Capital Growth Open Day | |
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Saturday 25th Sept was Capital Growth garden open day. The aim behind Capital Growth is to help facilitate the development of 2012 new food-growing areas in London in time for the Olympics in 2012. The hope is then for food to come off these sites to help feed the athletes and showcase local food. To date there are almost six hundred new food gardens, some of them really amazing. Capital Growth can provide seed ( pun intended )funding to help develop a food growing area in London, more details on the web at http://www.capitalgrowth.org. One of the Dream Farm areas, the Kings Cross orchard got enough funding from Capital Growth to buy about thirty fruit trees including apples, pears, cherries, plums, damsons and a peach. All of them are growing and we even got some plums and apples from them this year. Some of the visitors on Saturday helped pick forbidden fruits, which they then tucked into with a relish.
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| 16 Sep 2010 | Apple Day | |
In celebration of the King's Cross Orchard and its first harvest we will be hosting our second Apple Day this autumn. All are welcome to come and celebrate the apple and this free event will give all a chance to press your own apple juice, enjoy a range of apple treats, learn all about apples, and play some apple games!
This is a free event and all are welcome.
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| 13 Sep 2010 | Foraging and horticulture | | I have been so happy with the amount of annual food we have grown on Dream Farm that I decided to extend the growing area to under the fruit trees we planted four years ago, sort of combining planned foraging with horticulture.
We will plant out next spring so we need to start preparing the ground now. I am going for an easy first step and do some serious weed suppression by mulching. We have developed our own system here having lots of thick cardboard available. The first step is cuting all the weeds down. Then we put a thick layer of cardboard over the stubble and finally cover this with a good layer of compost from the pile on Camley Street.
We did this over the vineyard and it was very successful, even getting rid of bindweed. ( fingers crossed here ).
We now have the blue bean tree, the apricot, the sharon fruit, all the silverberry bushes which are flowering now and smell like jasmine, the pears and edible hawthorn growing from an almost instant soil bed. The mulching extends around the bee hives at the end of the garden and even the bees seem a bit shocked at the transformation, flying down to take a look. |
| 24 Apr 2010 | Food Junctions | |
April 24/25th and May 1st/ 2nd
In conjunction with University College London and the King's Cross Reveal Festival this Spring Alara will be involved in two weekends of activities centered on Camley Street which will bring together people from all walks of life to discuss, teach and learn about topics such as environmental sustainability, gardening, poetry and good health.
All will be welcome and more information to follow....
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| 18 Feb 2010 | Sustainable City Awards | |
| Alara has won two more awards for its sterling work in being a pioneering environmental business, this time at the Sustainable City Awards 2010, held at Mansion House in London. We were Highly Commended in the ‘Responsible Waste Management’ and ‘Environmental Management in SMEs’ categories, which is a fantastic result! |
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| 11 Nov 2009 | Food Manufacture Excellence Awards | |
| At the Food Manufacture Excellence Awards we were and crowned Small Company of the Year for our commitment to environmental principles. We have heard that one of the judges commented: "Alara's aspiration in managing resources, rather than generating waste goes outside where the industry is at the moment." |
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| 18 Oct 2009 | Apple Day | |
Sunday 18th October saw our hugely successful Apple Day with over 200 people turning up and helping make it a great day for all. The Mayor of Camden officially opened the BME garden, a fantastic Orchard was planted on our neighbours Booker Cash and Carry’s land, and Alex spoke about his vision for the Camley Street area.
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| 24 Sep 2009 | Best Resource Management Project | |
| In recognition of our efforts in becoming a Zero Waste Company, we were presented with the Best Resource Management Project Award by Valpak. |
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| 22 Apr 2009 | Outstanding Achievement Award 2009 for Environmental Excellence in Camden | |
| We're very pleased to win a fantastic award for Outstanding Achievement in Environmental Excellence in Camden! Alex was at the ceremony to collect the award from the Mayor of Camden in recognition for the all the sustainability work we have done including becoming a 'Zero Waste' company. |
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| 29 Mar 2009 | Grape vine planting | |
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A big thanks to everyone who helped on Sunday 29th March planting 30 grape vines in the new Alara vineyard at Kings Cross. It was a real festival of local food and community. We will let you know when the first celebratory bottle of Chateau Kings Cross is ready for drinking. Watch out for our next garden open day. See more photos
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| 18 Mar 2008 | Green Business of the Year Award | |
| Alara has been named as the Green Business of the Year at the Fast Growth Business Awards 2008! It's an absolutely fantastic feeling to win this award and means so much to our business. We've worked really hard to make Alara as environmentally, socially and financially sustainable as possible and it's very rewarding to know that our achievements have been recognised. Winning the award shows that running a successful business and being "green" are not mutually exclusive - you can do both! |
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| 1 Feb 2007 | Green Mark Certificate | | Many months of work have been reworded by achieving the Green Mark Certificate |
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