News / Veg box scheme sets up Carbon Classroom
A WEST side organic vegetable box scheme is branching out into teaching people to grow their own food and cut their carbon footprint.
After four years of producing and selling food from their croft in Sandness, Transition Turriefield (TT) has been awarded £38,443 from the Scottish government’s Climate Challenge Fund to develop their Carbon Classroom project.
The community interest company run by Penny Armstrong and Alan Robertson is to appoint a development officer to take the project forward over the next 20 months.
TT believe they can cut the west mainland’s carbon footprint by at least 489 tonnes by encouraging people to grow vegetables, reduce their reliance on imported food and cutting back food and other waste.
They will be running “grow your own” training courses, local food events, open days at the Turriefield croft and workshops with schools and community groups.
They also intend to prepare 100 grow packs of pots, compost and seeds to make it easy for households to start growing themselves.
The long term aim is to create a visitor centre similar, but smaller than the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales to find out about low carbon food production and lifestyles.
Armstrong said there had been a lot of interest amongst their 25 veg box customers, local people and volunteers about learning more about reducing their carbon footprint and becoming more self sufficient.
“A lot of this is about raising awareness, for example onions are being imported from New Zealand at the moment using a huge quantity of fossil fuels to produce and bring over here, when they are being grown in Scotland right now,” she said.
“This is about reducing fossil fuel use as a whole because it won’t last forever and we want to do our bit to reduce climate change and help Shetland become more self sufficient in terms of food production.”
Meanwhile they are experimenting all the time with ways of extending the growing season.
“Shetland isn’t the easiest environment to grow food, but we have managed to have salad as early as February and as late as Christmas Eve.”
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