Evie Murray, founder of Crops in Pots at the urban croft on Leith Links where they have just transformed a dilapidated former tennis pavilion into a new cafe with farm shop with plans to bring back farmers market.
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00:00 Where we are at the moment is called The Croft, locally known as The Croft,
00:03 its official name is Leith Community Croft.
00:06 It's two acres of common good land in Leith Links Park,
00:11 which we took on about 10 years ago, actually maybe a little bit longer
00:16 than 10 years, and it was really sort of a derelict,
00:20 sort of forgotten part of Leith Links Park.
00:23 Nobody really went into it because it just had quite a lot of litter and
00:28 stuff. When we took it on we went in and
00:32 cleaned it all up and then just said imagine what we could do with this space.
00:36 Year on year we've built consultation after consultation with
00:42 the community, got the feedback, what people wanted to
00:45 see happen here, and then gone about sort of trying to
00:48 deliver the community's aspirations. So we work with the community and
00:54 for the community to try to deliver what the community wish to see happen.
00:58 So, yeah.
01:02 So what kind of stuff do you grow here and who uses the space?
01:06 So it's quite a diverse mix of people, we've got
01:09 very young people, we've got parents, families,
01:12 children, older generation of people, we've got
01:17 people volunteer, we have our crofters that all grow their own food,
01:21 and we have people that come to our market garden
01:24 and contribute towards growing food for the
01:27 support of the initiative. And yeah, it's just a real diverse mix
01:33 of people and plants and biodiversity. It's a very
01:37 biodiverse space, we have all sorts of things growing.
01:42 And there's a really good story behind how you started it up.
01:44 Yeah, I started it up just after the economic
01:51 crash of 2008. I had very young children,
01:56 I had just been made redundant from my position as funding was getting
02:00 pulled from different jobs. And because I was sort of on maternity
02:05 leave at that time, I was very keen to get my kids outdoors.
02:09 It was just right at the sort of the bee crisis had just hit the
02:12 headlines. I felt that food was really kind of
02:16 important, it was an important thing for the community to feel empowered over
02:21 their food system, to really feel sort of more connected
02:24 with their food supply, where their food comes from.
02:27 I was kind of concerned with plastic waste, the amount of recycling I
02:31 was doing. My daughter at the time, she really
02:36 ate quite a lot of fruit, so I was buying punnets and punnets of
02:40 berries. And I got really interested in this idea of actually
02:44 needing to grow a fruit bush, or many fruit bushes,
02:47 to satisfy her appetite of fruit. So she always, now she's 13, but she
02:52 always looks back and says, "Did you start the charity?" because
02:55 I like eating fruit. So really I was quite sort of
03:03 aware of it being a very sort of inbuilt, densely populated area with lots of
03:10 social issues. I felt after working for many years as
03:14 a drug addiction counsellor, that there was a lot of social problems.
03:18 And I really felt that the Croft would be quite
03:21 powerful, or that growing food, not the Croft, because the Croft came later,
03:25 but that growing food would be a very powerful act
03:28 for us to take forward.
03:34 So now 10 years on, and you've just done this big refurbishment,
03:38 tell me about what you're hoping for the space, and
03:42 do you want to invite people to come down and check it out?
03:46 So we are like 10 years on, we have just had the sort of
03:50 the major funding from the Scottish Government to renovate the pavilion
03:54 that is down further at the other end of the Croft.
03:58 And that was a really big project for us to manage, but we now have
04:03 our hub, our home, the Croftage, as we're starting to call it,
04:10 where we really now have a centre that can help pull the whole
04:16 project together. The building will now have a farm shop,
04:20 a cafe, an event space, we do our farmers market,
04:25 we're getting ready to do our launch party, we're going to call it our
04:29 launchiversary, because it's the 10-year anniversary of the Charities Foundation,
04:34 but also the launch of the new pavilion in the centre, so we're looking
04:38 to have a really big event in September. And yeah, we'd encourage everybody to
04:42 come down and visit us and find out more about what we're doing.