Community Power Podcast Series 3 Episode 3: A growing legacy – Winterton’s journey to a community orchard

Episode 3: A growing legacy – Winterton’s journey to a community orchard

Chris Allen

Hello and welcome to this month’s community power podcast, a series being brought to you in partnership with Local Trust. My name’s Chris Allen, and in this series of podcasts, we’re showcasing some incredible projects, focusing in particularly on what happens when you give local people the resources, the power and the assets to make a difference to their neighbourhoods. With me is series producer Kirsten Sinclair, so Kirsten this week, very much a long, lasting legacy. 

Kirsten Sinclair

Yes, Chris, we are off to Winterton Big Local to chat with worker Kerrie Prowting and resident Sarah Hussey about their community orchard and how they have engaged with local residents to create, as you say, a lasting legacy which will be highly dependent on a dedicated bunch of volunteers. 

Chris Allen

Indeed it will. And first of all, I asked Kerrie to tell us where the idea of an orchard came from in the first place. 

Kerrie Prowting

Right at the start of the Big Local programme back in 2013, one of the main themes that came through, and has come through every year since, was that Winterton is a clean and green town. So what evolved from that was to attempt to set up an Incredible Edible project in the town. The Incredible Edible project started in Todmorden in West Yorkshire, and it is a project where people grow and share produce. So you might have planters on your high street or at your train station, and people all sort of muck in together and get involved in tending to the plants and using the plants afterwards. It was something that we piloted in Winterton, and that is still going now as well actually. We’ve still got some community planters in the town. But we also wanted to do something more. And Winterton is a, is a like a rural former market town still surrounded by agricultural land. So it’s something that’s in the heritage of the town as well, and something that local people wanted to happen. 

Chris Allen

So you’ve got that heritage within, within the town. But did Winterton itself reflect that wider heritage, or did you have less green space in Winterton? 

Kerrie Prowting

I would say the town itself is, is, I mean, it’s a historic town, so you’ve got the usual issues, I guess, with sort of town planning in the age of the houses and stuff. So I would say in the actual town itself, there’s not a huge amount of green space. It’s on the periphery, which is also where our field that we purchased for the orchard is so… 

Chris Allen

And Sarah, you’re a volunteer in the programme, a member of the Big Local partnership I’m assuming. How long have you been involved. 

Sarah Hussey

Yeah, about six years now. It feels like it’s gone really quick, but yeah, six years. 

Chris Allen

That sounds better than ​“it feels like it’s been forever”. That’s not really a good thing to say. That’s a really, really good. And what drew you into being involved? 

Sarah Hussey

I’m not from Winterton, so we kind of moved here around the same sort of time. I think it’s just a way to get involved with what’s going on in the local town. It’s a way to meet different people. And just, it sounds a bit cheesy, but I do kind of like to give something back, because this is like our community. So just to make it a better place, because it’s where we live. 

Chris Allen

Nothing cheesy in that. I think, you know, that’s obviously what Big Local has been encouraging people to do, is to be the decision makers, really, in their communities, which is, you know, been really, really important. And you’ve been getting your hands dirty with the with the planting and everything there and does, is that something you enjoy doing? 

Sarah Hussey

I didn’t realise I did, but I do now, yeah, very knowledgeable. I know how to plant trees and everything. Yeah, it was actually really fun to get stuck in and to do something physical. It’s because I feel like we’ve been planning it for so long. It was nice to see it come to something and to actually get, you know, you dig in in the ground, and you’re putting your plants in and, yeah, to just see it all come to fruition was really good. 

Chris Allen

Obviously, gives you a lot of satisfaction as well. And you must have other people working with you, because I think you planted 500 trees, I’m sure you didn’t do it on your own. 

Sarah Hussey

It was all me and Kerry. No, we had a lot of help, didn’t we? We’re very lucky. 

Chris Allen

And Kerry, you talked there about purchasing the land. What was the kind of process you had to go through in order to buy because obviously that’s not, it’s easily said, but not easily done quite often? 

Kerrie Prowting

Yeah, I mean, actually, that’s probably been the trickiest bit of all of it. Because on paper, we, we did a consultation with the town back pre COVID-19, probably in about 2018 at one of the, sort of one of the big events in the town, which is an agricultural show. So, you know, everybody in the town turns up for that. We had a huge, huge response from the public. And we thought, okay, this is excellent. We’re going to buy this field. We’re going to build this sort of community, orchard, market garden, habitat for wildlife, sort of place. 

And then, then the sort of the difficulties began in trying to source a piece of land. We thought, again, that would be quite easy. There’s probably a farmer [who] will sell us a field, but we…So we literally ended up doing door to door knocking. You know, ​“is this big bit of land behind your house, yours? Would you consider selling it to us?” Because one, one issue that we had that we weren’t aware of at all is that each local authority area has a sort of a housing allocation. And I imagine it must be the same throughout the country. And if the housing allocation isn’t being met, then planning appeals were getting turned over. So on greenbelt land, where people wouldn’t traditionally be able to apply for housing planning permission, these were being submitted and getting turned down because the local authority didn’t want it, and then getting overturned. So what happened was people were keeping hold of their land, hoping to sell it for a better price for housing. 

Chris Allen

Right.

Kerrie Prowting

So this was a massive block for us, because, you know, the price of agricultural land was maybe 50% of what you could get for it and sell it to a developer. Maybe even more, if, you know, if you own a really prime bit of land. Eventually, though, we found a really nice local guy who was a farmer, was still farming the piece of land and he offered to sell us one of his fields. 

Chris Allen

And what kind of size of land are we talking about? 

Kerrie Prowting

We have five and a half acres. 

Chris Allen

That’s a fair amount. 

Kerrie Prowting

It is big. I would estimate maybe three football pitches. 

Sarah Hussey

Yeah, it is a huge piece of land. I walked around it all and I didn’t think it was that big. And I was walking for ages. I was thinking, I’ve still not got to the other end here. 

Chris Allen

That’s a good size. Now we know the way that Big Local works in terms of it has a locally trusted organisation or an accountable body in other people’s language. So who actually bought and owned the land to start with? 

Kerrie Prowting

So we were…because we’d foreseen this, we had already set up a legacy organisation. 

Chris Allen

That was my next question. Well done. 

Kerrie Prowting

Yeah. So, we had a community interest company (CIC) already set up. So it was the community interest company that bought the piece of land via a grant from the Big Local. 

Chris Allen

That obviously, then is, is asset locked, isn’t it? So it’s preserved, indeed. 

Kerrie Prowting

Yeah.

Chris Allen

And was there much overlap between you, your partnership, and your community interest company, or were you able to find enough people to cover both bases really? 

Kerrie Prowting

At the moment, there is a lot of overlap, and that’s something that we do need to work on. Once the Big Local partnership winds down in picking up that membership for the for the wider CIC. The community interest company is going to be a new phase, and with that, we hope we get new people, because Big Local is obviously 10 years old now. We want new volunteers, new community members coming forward to take it forward. So it was all in the planning Chris. 

Chris Allen

Indeed and there’s this kind of transition now from partnerships into legacy organisations. You’ve got one in place that can obviously, owns the land there to work on. Now you had the big plant initiative that’s around the, I presume, that’s around the growing round the town like Todmorden, the Incredible Edible, and then it led on to your orchard. 

In terms of planting trees, your orchard, when will it come to fruition, so to speak, in terms of, there’ll be fruit hanging on them. Is it a bit? Is it a long time, or is it, you know, going to be quite a short time Sarah? 

Sarah Hussey

I think it’s going to be a long time. However, don’t ask me to put a number on that, because I’m not a tree. I can’t remember the figures, but I don’t think it’s going to be anytime soon. I think it’ll take a while for it to come to fruition. 

Chris Allen

And Kerrie, have you got any more insights into that one? 

Kerrie Prowting

I think we’re probably looking at a couple of years now. What we did do is with, I mean, we’ve got a massive amount of species of different trees, and even different varieties of like apple and pear and damson and all of this so. And I know that. I mean, I’ve read the instructions, but I’m not an expert either. I think you are looking at one to two years. But the hedging, apparently, we should start to see some progress on the hedges quite quickly, which will be nice, because we do need to see a bit of progress now. 

Sarah Hussey

The different like some of the trees, are all different sizes as well, aren’t they? Some of them look quite established already, so you think they’re not going to take too long, but some of them are quite small, so it’ll just depend I guess won’t it. 

Chris Allen

It will indeed. And I got down here 1000 hedging plants and shrubs that you put in there already. So those are the ones you hope will come to fruition. And within, within that, have you also got fruit growing? Is that the idea too? 

Kerrie Prowting

Absolutely, yes. I mean, the our vision, I guess, and that which we hope will be reflected in the community – but you know, it’s like an organic process anyway – is that we will have this produce, and we will use produce, you know. So there’s going to be apples, there’s going to be pears, plums, there’s going to be heritage varieties people won’t have seen in supermarkets, you know. 

If we end up with a, like, a massive glut, I guess, of apples, we will be distributing them to other community projects and, you know, and if we’ve still got too many, we’ll be, we’ll be, you know, bringing them into local towns and stuff nearby. We really want to utilise this, this produce for the community. 

Chris Allen

Now obviously, planting all these trees and planting all these hedgerows doesn’t just happen without a lot of help. What kind of help have you had? 

Sarah Hussey

So we were quite lucky that we had a company called The Conservation Volunteers (TCV). They came out. We did the planting over a course of three days. So they came out, did a lot of the manual work. A lot of the teaching of how to actually plant the trees and doing it the right way. Yeah, we were quite lucky to have their help. 

Chris Allen

And is the hope to have their help moving forward as well Kerrie, is that, is that a part of the kind of maintenance side of this, or they, they’ve come in, they’ve educated you, and now they’re moving on to somewhere else? 

Kerrie Prowting

No, we’ve been really fortunate, actually, because I think we’ve managed to gain from the Northern Forest Initiative. So it’s been a really good partnership locally, of ourselves, North Lincolnshire Council, Humber forest and TCV. So TCV basically go out and get involved in planting initiatives to plant huge numbers of trees in the Humber area. 

So we were really fortunate in that probably about 80% of our trees were paid for by them, and they come along with volunteers and stuff as well. And there’s also a maintenance schedule, so they will come out. If any of our trees die off, they can replace a certain number of them, and they’ll come out and just monitor the site, make sure everything’s as it should be for two to three years. 

Chris Allen

And in terms of looking after the land and caring for it and monitoring now, I’m sure fruit doesn’t just I know it grows, but it doesn’t just grow without a lot of tender and loving care as well. How are you going to manage that? What kind of capacity do you need in order to keep that ongoing process going? Because five acres is quite a size. 

Kerrie Prowting

Do you know? I don’t think we know. Being honest, it’s something, it’s something to discuss at our next CIC meeting. We’ve now got, we’ve got the trees in place, and literally, what now, guys? I mean, because we, we’ve still got a massive amount of space in between all of the trees. So do we look at moving forward with our plan? Because we do have, like, a master plan for the site that includes things like soft fruit and paths and a pond and that kind of thing. Or, you know, do we give over some of the grass to wild flowers to help the bees? It’s something that’s really nice about the process, because we can gather information as we go along, and we can be responsive. So we can, sort of, you know, if the community turn around and say they want us to focus on hedgehogs this year, we can focus on hedgehogs. 

Chris Allen

I think you’re right. So in fact, it’s lovely that it’s not over designed, over planned. It’s got some chance to grow like nature does. So Sarah, sounds like there’s going to be a lot to do in there, and you’re obviously enjoying it. Now, what do you see as the benefit for the wider community, beyond, in a sense, the food aspect. What are the wider benefits? 

Sarah Hussey

We’ve not really got a similar space in the town currently to, kind of, when Kerrie said about, like, the pond. I think it would just be a really nice place for people, whether that’s couples, families, you know, kids, to just kind of use this space to enjoy. I think one of the ideas that we’ve had is like, you know, some picnic benches, just like space where people could meet and gather and just enjoy the surroundings. And we’ve not really got anything like that. 

We’ve got, you know, we’ve got, like a wood in the town, but we’ve not really got kind of a space that has all of the things that we’ve got our mind set on. So I think it’ll just kind of bring together everything that the community will benefit from, really. 

Chris Allen

So it’s a lovely place to be, as well as well as to grow and as well as to eat. 

Sarah Hussey

That’s our vision, isn’t it? Somewhere people can enjoy. 

Chris Allen

Have any people when you were planning all this and had the idea, say, ​“Oh, that’ll never work.” Or ​“oh, young people will come and vandalise it”, or anything along those lines? 

Sarah Hussey

Yeah the vandalism definitely, yeah, we get that one quite a lot. 

Chris Allen

And what’s your kind of response to it then, Sarah, because it’s sometimes just pouring a damp squib on everything. And isn’t it, it just spoils everything. When you get that kind of enthusiasm, drains through the floor at times? 

Sarah Hussey

We had something similar, probably the time that we started planting, just the other week. And I think we got some comments, comments of, you know, ​“what’s going to happen when it does get vandalised? Who’s going to be looking after this?” I just don’t see it happening. 

I think the fact that we’ve got people in the community that have come out to plant the trees, so we had like kids from the school come out, they did some of the planting. And I think the fact that it is a community field and people are having input into it should minimise the likelihood of vandalism to happen, because people have had their input into it. They’re going to want to look after it. They’re going to you know, not want to see it get ruined. 

Chris Allen

Well, it’s important to be positive. And I think that sense of ownership, if it’s owned by the town, owned by young people, then obviously they will, they will look after it. You know, that’s, that’s the way these things tend to work. Kerrie, your thoughts on that aspect really. Do you feel you’ve got that real sense of ownership right across the age spectrum? 

Kerrie Prowting

Um, yeah, I do think we do, but we do need to do more work on it, because where it’s been such a long, drawn out process, I mean, people fall off, off of the group you know, and off of initiatives as you, as you go along. So yeah, we still need to build on it. But yes, at this moment in time, I would say we’ve got a good, a good representation of people that have been involved. 

Both of the schools came down, did some planting with us, lots of people from other community groups, and we’ve got quite a good network through the Big Local project of other local groups, so people know what’s going on, I think. But you’d probably also like one of the negative comments that we got was, ​“there’s already too much fruit in the town”. Of course, you’d like that one. 

Chris Allen

Absolutely. That’s a new one. 

Kerrie Prowting

If that’s the best comment, then we’re all right with that. 

Chris Allen

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And again, there’s always people who can eat fruit, so you’ll find a way of getting rid of it appropriately. Or you make a lot of apple pies. You know, that’s the way these things tend to work. It’s going to be a key part of your legacy. Quite clearly, how will that fit in with your wider legacy? What else do you see as part of your legacy from the programme? 

Kerrie Prowting

I think probably our major legacy is going to be the initiatives that we’ve been able to support as the project has gone on. So we’ve been able to help organisations when they’re in their like, really fledgling, early stages. And I think they will, they will last longer than, perhaps anything other than physical assets. So we’ve got a group that have been running a sort of Christmas light switch on, [the] lantern parade initiative through Big Local. They’ve been getting advice and support from external agencies to help them to move forwards. They’re in a position now where they are gathering in external funding, training up their workers, pushing it out, making it bigger and better. So that’s one really good one we’ve had. 

Even down to like the local men in sheds that we were able to support with, sort of rent and council tax or sort of business rates early on and support them through COVID-19 to be able to keep going. Sometimes it can be quite hard to document it, but I think we know that the impact that we’ve had there. In terms of physical spaces, we’re hoping to be successful in a bid to the Community Ownership Fund (a now closed UK Government fund to support communities to take ownership of local assets) to purchase a former working men’s club in the town. 

Chris Allen

Wow. You’re being ambitious right to the end then. 

Kerrie Prowting

Absolutely, we get really crazy ideas, we discuss about how we’re going to use the apples on the orchard. We’re going to make our own cider, which we’re then going to sell in the club, yeah. So there’s, there’s as much ambition now, right at the end, as there was at the beginning, I would say. 

Chris Allen

I was being a bit cheeky with the apple pies. I was going to say cider, but I thought, no, I’ll say apple pies. You know, I’ll be cool. I’ll be cautious. 

Kerrie Prowting

And the pies as well. We do want the pies. 

Chris Allen

We do want the pies as well. And you have lived for a relatively short amount of time in the area, Sarah, for what you were saying earlier. Are you feeling that this is an even better place to live than when you first moved in? Does it give you that feeling? Maybe it’s just about your sense of belonging in the community. Or do you think round about the area? You think actually this is getting better day by day? 

Sarah Hussey

Yeah, definitely. It’s not been a super quick process. It has been sort of a lengthier process with the technicalities of getting everything done. And like, the process of buying, essentially, buying the building again. It does take time, but because of that time that was spent doing this, it does make me think things are happening and things are going to get better. And things are going to continue to get better, because we’re quite clearly, we’re not finished, even though we’re coming to the end of the, you know, the project itself, we’re not, we’re nowhere near finished. And so there’s still lots more work to do and lots more opportunity to just improve things. It’s, yeah, I definitely feel like for me personally, it’s improved where I live. 

Chris Allen

And Kerrie, you’re, you’ve been there as the worker. Your future, are you able to be continued, to be employed there when the money runs out? Or is it, are you going to be moving onto pastures new to pardon the pun? 

Kerrie Prowting

I can’t say for sure, actually. I’m quite open minded, so which is a nice place to be. However, Sarah will tell you that we had a discussion last week, and I was like, ​“my future is in outdoor work and orchards and doing the digging.” I was like, ​“This is my new career.” So anything could happen. 

Sarah Hussey

Kerrie’s gonna, Kerrie’s gonna run our field. You know, you said before, who’s gonna look after the trees? Kerrie, Kerrie’s gonna look after the field, aren’t you? 

Kerrie Prowting

Yeah, I might. I need some training, quick, though, before the end. 

Chris Allen

Well, thank you both very much indeed. And it sounds like, you know, this is real lasting legacy, irrespective of buildings and organisations, you know, trees, they’re there for good, you know. And they will, they will be there. And I hope you got appropriate signage around there, so in 25 years, people will remember where this orchard came from. 

Kerrie Prowting

We haven’t yet, but we will. 

Sarah Hussey

Work in progress. It’s definitely on our list. We have a long list and it’s on there. 

Chris Allen

That was Sarah Hussey and before that, we heard from Kerrie Prowting from Winterton Big Local, telling us about their ambitions for their field, their fruit, their apple pies and even cider. Kirsten, this is the time when we literally can say, watch this space. 

Kirsten Sinclair

Indeed. Chris, I think it’s absolutely inspirational to see how a community have come to creating and growing their own community orchard and you know, hopefully this will inspire other communities to do the same. 

Chris Allen

And at the heart of it as well, obviously, volunteers and so we recognise how valuable they are, and without them, most things in most communities would not happen. So where can we find out more? 

Kirsten Sinclair

Yes, well, everything will be in the show notes. 

Chris Allen

Thanks, Kirsten, indeed. Please do follow up in the show notes. And Kirsten and I look forward to you joining us next time on the community power podcast, brought to you by Local Trust, discovering what happens when you give local people the power, the money and the assets to make a difference to their neighbourhoods.