Incredible Edible Barnet: 2025 Year In Review

Every Incredible Edible group is unique. They each embody the Incredible Edible ethos in their own special way.

This year we are sharing a round up of reflections looking back over the year from a small selection of our groups. Today, we’re hearing from Incredible Edible Barnet in London, with thanks to Wendy for ‘spilling the beans’ on their gardening this last year.

 

What is your favourite or most successful crop you have grown this year?

Peaches! We’ve had a peach tree in the garden for seven years and it usually succumbs to peach leaf curl so doesn’t have enough energy to support the developing fruit. It absolutely loved the warm, dry summer this year though and we enjoyed a bumper harvest. This shows the need to plant for varying climates with each year bring such different weather.

What has been your biggest success, or something you are proud of?

Alongside running our main growing space this year, we also had some funding from our local council to run a ‘How to be a community food grower’ course. Via the eight-week course, we aimed to build the capacity of local residents and community groups to establish and run new community food growing projects across the borough of Barnet. People attended from schools, food banks, friends of park groups, various charities, libraries, faith buildings and more and we’re hoping to see several new food growing spaces germinating in 2026 and beyond.

Are there any challenges or difficulties you overcame this year?

As many food growers will have experienced this summer, especially those in the southeast of the UK, it was hard to keep plants well-watered in the extremely dry weather. Some plants suffered as a result, like the carlin peas we were trying to grow for the first time. To help in future years we are trying to improve our soil structure by adding lots more leaf mould. Our council are helping too, by bringing us bags of leaves collected from our local parks which we will ‘cook’ for a year before adding to our growing beds.

Can you share a valuable lesson you learned this year, big or small?

Monitoring the biodiversity in your garden is both fun and important. As well as growing fruit, veg and flowers we also like to encourage a wide range of wildlife into the garden. We have several bug hotels, ponds and bird boxes, as well as hedgehog holes, hover-fly lagoons and dead hedges. This year we dedicated a session to just monitoring the insects in the garden, and we’ve started an iNaturalist project to keep a log of what we find.

What are you most looking forward to in 2026?

We sowed some wheat in October and it seems to be settling in well. Hopefully we’ll be able to harvest enough to make a loaf next year, or maybe just a roll! Either way, it’s going to be fun watching it grow and to be able to show people passing our plot what this staple food crop looks like.

Do you have any words of encouragement you would share with someone thinking about starting a new Incredible Edible group?

1 – Get set up to stay in touch with your supporters as quickly as you can. An email list and social media accounts will set you off to a good start. You don’t need to post and email often but they allow people to contact you and you to shout about all the great things you’re getting up to.

2 – Reach out to other community growers in your area. A network of any size will inspire you when things get tough and encourage you to keep growing.

3 – Grow what you and your community love to eat. But also try something new each year.

And last but certainly not least, a wonderful suggestion and reminder from Wendy about how Incredible Edible groups can be a force for change;

Community growers need to get behind the increasing number of campaigns striving to encourage people in the UK to eat more beans (or pulses). Pulses provide a great way to reduce the high environmental impact of our diets, and can be tasty, cheap and healthy to boot. We held an event called ‘Cool Beans’ this year to celebrate the brilliance of beans and the wonderfully named campaigns ‘Bang in Some Beans’, ‘Full of Beans’ and ‘Raising the Pulse’ will provide some bean-spiration too.