00:00The annual Open Farm Sunday initiative is managed by Linking Environment and Farming, or LEAF,
00:06and aims to inspire public appreciation for sustainable farming practices that nurture nature.
00:12Swillington Organic Farm and the LS26 area of Leeds welcome visitors from across the region
00:18who are keen to find out about the farm's egg share and garden share schemes
00:22which have helped to restore the historic walled garden,
00:24and meet some of the four-legged friends who call this part of Yorkshire home.
00:29I'm Michael Leddy, I'm the head grower here at Swillington Organic Farm.
00:33The garden here is quite a special place, it's a community-supported agriculture scheme, we call it a CSA.
00:39And so the idea is that the members come and get involved and they help us grow it,
00:43and they support us, you know, from the start of the season.
00:46So they're like invested in the produce, and yeah, a big part of it is like educating people
00:52on where the food comes from, and like seeing kids come in and learn that food comes from seeds and from the soil.
00:58Rather than supermarket shells.
01:00We moved house, and we ended up with three chickens, and then we met Jo, who is the owner of Swillington Organic Farm.
01:11And she was doing a farm walk, very similar to this, where me and my wife and my children had a walk around,
01:17and we were actually like, this is brilliant, we love it.
01:20And then we started volunteering, we started helping Jo, she started teaching us all the generations of wisdom of organic farming.
01:28And we kind of fell in love with it, to a point now where we're looking for a zone farm.
01:32We've got, my wife is 100% invested in this farming journey, where she now does, she makes her own soap from the goats, so we've got goats.
01:42She does tours to schools to educate children, she goes to care homes to teach people and brighten up people's days with lambs and chicks.
01:51One of my favourite tasks every season is the tomato trellising, so you can see in the tunnel behind me here, they're all on strings and trained up.
01:59I mean, we sowed these plants back in February, and you look after them through to like October, so you know, you're with them for a long time.
02:07It's been very positive, it's been very well received by everybody that's come.
02:11It's not just the children either, so obviously the children are running around and they want to see the lambs and the chicks and everything like that,
02:16but then watching the adults get excited about it as well, I think that's quite important because there's obviously been some sort of generational gap
02:23where these things have been missed from as day-to-day lives and now it's things like this, like the Open Farm Sunday, that then promotes it and it gives a new breadth
02:32and now there's a full generation of kids that are going to be open to this.
02:35You can see where your lambs coming from, you can see the cows, you can see the big open air, and I think that's quite refreshing.
02:42We've got the master bricklayers, the Forbes, and they're building a like a medieval style turf bench using traditional lime mortar.
02:51So people get to come and have a go at bricklaying.
02:54It's not really work if you enjoy it, you know, you find something you want to do, you never work a day in your life.
