Community Cook-Ups: Celebrating Harvest and Connection

This year, our community has been brought together by the healing power of food!

Our youth volunteers took the lead in the kitchen during May half term, cooking up a feast for forty people as part of our Spring Celebration. Every ingredient was freshly picked from the garden — our first harvest of the year! A big thank you to Muddy Boots for helping with our very first potato harvest and providing plenty of produce for our young chefs to work with.

The menu was a real celebration of the season: broad bean bruschetta, elderflower cordial, wild garden pesto, new potatoes with herb sauce, berry garden jam, and even a friendly bake-off with our wild whim scones — sweet and savoury varieties competing for top spot!

After the success of spring, we came together again in late summer for another community cook-up, this time celebrating the abundance of courgettes and tomatoes.

Our harvests have continued to give back to the community throughout the year, with produce going into weekly Patch soups lovingly prepared by volunteer Jill, sustaining all volunteers and participants of The Power House. Our produce has also been shared with Waste Not Want Not for their Fun with Food activities and with Poole Community Trust for their own cook-ups.

These shared meals aren’t just about food — they’re about connection, confidence, and the joy of growing and cooking together. Every cook-up helps nurture wellbeing, reduce waste, and bring people of all ages together around a shared table. We look forward to bringing everyone together again as we pay our thanks for the abundant autumn harvest and continue to share our stores throughout the winter to keep the community content and warm.