On the snowy evening of 24 November, about 17 of us turned up at the Baptist Church to create and share our vision for Norwich Community Agriculture. You can see the result here.It was an inspiring occasion. We'd decided to use the "dreaming circle" approach from Dragon Dreaming. Facilitated by Tierney and scribed by Josiah, it worked amazingly well, and really captured the dreams, visions and determinations of everyone present. The result is a document that I find truly inspiring, a reminder of how great NCA can be, and in how many different ways we can learn better ways of doing things.
Our intention is to keep referring back to this vision, as we go on to plan the more practical steps we need to take. The next stage in planning those steps will be on January 13th, again at the Baptist Church. We plan to borrow from Dragon Dreaming again, this time to create a "karabirrt" - a project plan that connects with our vision and with the big "project" of which NCA is just a small part.
Meanwhile the Board has met again and finalised the Rules for NCA, and signed the incorporation documents that lead to the legal incorporation of the new co-op.
The Environment and Growing group has met and agreed a plan for planting trees and hedges at Postwick. Unfortunately we then ran up against various constraints that we hadn't appreciated at first - for example that if we plant a hedge across the field, it might become protected in planning terms, so understandably our landlord is not keen for us to do that. And that other proposals we had impinge on promises already made under his Stewardship scheme. He's offered alternative locations for the trees and hedges, so hopefully we can work it out when that group meets again on 5 January. The plan is for the group to turn up over the last weekend of January and get the trees and hedge planted - do come along!
And one last piece of exciting news - we have a tractor. That's it in the picture. It's a Ford 4160, from the 1970s. As you can see, it's got a roof and everything. Fantastic.
