August 2026 Newsletter
25 Years of Service + Relaunching Our Blog
Earlier this month we were lucky enough to celebrate 25 years of faithful service from Lutfun, our Community Gardener, in a special event that was beautifully catered for by our good friend Farokh, of St John Restaurant. Our Shop Manager and resident blog writer Izzy wrote a piece about the event, which marks the relaunch of our blog platform and a commitment to publish one a month - so our readers have this extra little bonus to look forward to monthly too, now. Thank you for everything, Lutfun, we value you enormously.
Backyard Biennial Neighbourhood Party x Whitechapel Gallery
We are excited to announce that for one day only, on Saturday 8th August in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery and other local spaces Fredrica’s and House of Annetta, we will all be running a free, all-day neighbourhood party, bringing all our spaces to life with a multi-disciplinary programme of live performances, workshops, installations, participatory experiences, creative experiments, and more. Click here for the full programme, and read on below for the events at the Farm!
Family Workshop | Paper Process Lab
12pm – 4pm | Drop-in, no booking required
Connecting with themes of material history in the local area, this workshop asks how can we transform wastepaper through playful exploration?
Children and families will be invited to test out different material processes in a hands-on papermaking lab, mashing paper pulp, making egg box putty, moulding paper clay, and twisting paper ropes.
Working with artist educator Sadie Edginton, children will be invited to participate in building a collective play structure out of paper rope, riffing off the local histories of rope making, which inform The Ropery exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery.
Community Recipe Book Build
From 12pm | Drop-in, no booking required
Bring along your recipes to add to our Spitalfields City Farm recipe book!
Inspired by the Coriander Club growing group established by community gardener Lutfun Hussein, House of Annetta and Slow + Dirty Press have created riso-printed recipe book pages for visitors to fill out, decorate, and embellish to build a collective recipe book to take home.
Weaving Workshop with Rezia Wahid
From 2pm - 4pm | Drop-in, no booking required
Rezia Wahid MBE is a an artist, weaver an educator. She will be reviving the large loom we have on the farm, join us to learn about weaving using natural materials from the farm (plants, wool and even donkey hair). Rezia will show you how to use our looms and you can add to a collaborative woven cloth.
Baler Twine Weaving
From 2pm | Drop-in, no booking required
The farm tries to run as a circular system, creating as little waste as possible and reusing wherever we can. One thing that's hard to recycle is the brightly coloured plastic twine which binds hay bales together. We get through so many bales (most of our animals eat hay) that we are always looking for creative ways to use all the pink, orange and yellow string. Join us for an experiment to see if we can weave with baling twine on our vintage upright loom.
Beekeeping at the East London Mosque - in conversation with Bushwood Bees
From 2pm - 4pm | Drop-in, no booking required
Salma Attan from Bushwood Bees will be talking us through her experience of keeping beehives on the roof of the East London Mosque, their relationship to her faith and community and also the incredible social structures of a honey bee colony. Salma will also be selling local raw honey and other hive products on the day.
This session will include a chance to look safely into our own honeybee colonies (weather depending!) using our glass observation hive.
Stay and Play at the Ram and Magpie
From 10am - 1pm
Take a seat and watch your little ones play outdoors. We'll have play equipment, sensory elements and trikes available all day for children to enjoy in the Ram and Magpie garden and den building materials for older kids in the grass walkway area.
Youth Wellness Event - watch this space...
On 22nd August, our friends at Communicate Music are taking over the gardens for a youth wellness event! If you’re interested, keep your eyes on our socials (buttons at the bottom of this newsletter); more details coming soon!
Farmyard News - new residents!
We have a beautiful new guinea pig family here at the Farm! As of this Tuesday, when we welcomed four new babies from mama pigs, we now have a total of ten new babies including those four, and seven new adults. These came to us from a residential address who had believed they had adults all of the same gender - until babies began appearing! They are VERY sweet. Come and say hi when you're at the Farm next.
Photo credits: Gregoire Chaillet
Veg of the Month + Farm Shop
This month we've had some bumper crops of tigerella tomatoes, cucumbers, golden delicious apples, figs, mulberries, white courgettes, and our kodus are doing particularly well too, not to mention our plums (Mirabelle, Victoria, greengages), which just won't stop falling!
They're all variously for sale in the shop - pop in and see what seasonal veg is on the shelves today. We’re trying to keep the fridge stocked up for you but please bear with us in this busy period, as sometimes we do sell out quite quickly.
We are also still looking for donations of plastic/paper/tote bags! Please bring yours in when you can and we'll reuse them.
Volunteer Spotlight
This month, we're spotlighting Bronte, who is one of our much-valued Garden volunteers. In her words:
"What I love about the Farm is that I have the chance to meet so many people that I would not otherwise meet. I come from a small, ethnocentric town in Australia, and it is so nice to garden with people who are from different cultures. I live in Whitechapel alongside the Bangladeshi-Muslim community, and it is amazing to be a part of a space that gives me the opportunity to understand people in my community more, as well as try their delicious food!
My highlight has been taking a ladder to the mulberry tree and picking fruits for the shop. My nonno had a mulberry tree in his garden, and it takes me back to the time I spent in his garden with him."
Trustee Spotlight - new feature!
This month, we're introducing a new newsletter feature - a spotlight section for each of our trustees (at least until we have featured them all!)
Our board members give us their time and expertise for free, and guide us strategically, each with different skills and experience that are absolutely invaluable to us as a small charity. To kick this series off, we have Giles Charlton, who is the director of local landscape architect Spacehub, a firm we have collaborated with on a few projects over the years. He first stumbled across us around a decade ago, when he was involved in the Bishopsgate Goods Yard first planning application and getting to know local community spaces as part of that initial project research. He tells us that he immediately felt a natural energy here, and an immediate sense of the importance of keeping a space like this alive.
To read the full interview, click the button below. Thank you for your service, Giles!
Restaurant Partners
This month's local restaurant crops included plenty of tomatoes and lots of colourful greens - seen here ready to go out for delivery on our cargo bike. If you work for a local restaurant that is interested in cooking with our produce, get in touch!
Today we meet Wioletta (seen with Head Chef, Farokh) and Abby, who both work at St John in Spitalfields.
Site News
With gratitude to Tower Hamlets Borough Council for the necessary funding, we are now working on improving pathways around the Farm to make them more accessible for wheelchair users and pushchairs. We also recently had solar panels installed on top of our stables with help from the Tower Hamlets Carbon Reduction Community Grant, which helps us meet some of our sustainability and greening aims – we will store excess electricity generated in the summer in on-site batteries for use in the winter. This will not only help reduce our electricity bills but will also mean we will primarily be running on green renewable energy through the sunnier months! We will track stats at the end of every month to show how much electricity has been generated.
You may have noticed a new area developing at the front of the farm. This is for the benefit of the local community, and you can ask us anything about it you like when you visit the site.
A more regular newsletter for you...
We are moving from bi-monthly to monthly newsletters from this edition on. As mentioned at the top, there will be a regular blog feature too now. If you'd like to change your subscription preferences, scroll to the bottom of this edition and click on the relevant link.
That's it for this edition! Thank you for reading.
The Farm is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10.00am to 4.30pm.
We look forward to welcoming you soon.