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Daily Bread was a community wheat-growing project that started in March 2020 during the lockdown and ran until Harvest Festival 2020.
Who We Are
Read more about the Eco Team on About Earth Justice
What We Do
Daily Bread was a community wheat-growing project which ran from March 2020 until Harvest Festival 2020.
Getting Involved
For details of our current activities, subscribe to the Weekly Newsletter and follow our Eco Church twitter account
Daily Bread was a community wheat-growing project connecting city-dwellers with food production, engaging with ecological and environmental concerns, and exploring humanity’s 10,000 year relationship with wheat.
Our wheat was blessed and sown in the courtyard at St James’s on Sunday 15th March 2020, and across London and beyond by members of our community. The very next week the country went into lockdown and care for the growing crop in Piccadilly fell to Lucy our Rector, the only person on site.
We celebrated Lammas and the ‘first fruits’ of the harvest on 2nd August. The bulk of our crop was harvested, threshed and winnowed in September ready for our Harvest Festival in October.
Throughout the project, we published colourful artistic reflections about our wheat, with art by Sara Mark, poetry by Diane Pacitti and scientific input by Deborah Colvin. All these are downloadable in the PDF library below.
Reflections about our wheat, with art by Sara Mark, poetry by Diane Pacitti and scientific input by Deborah Colvin.
Daily Bread
1. Fallow
2. Scatter
3. Germinate
4. Springing
5. Rising
6. Heaven and Earth
7. Tillering
8. Breadth
9. Blakefull
10. Rogation
11. Elongation
12. Expecting
13. Flowering
14. Extraordinary
15. Adamah and Eve
16. How to Harvest
17. Lammas
18. Soil
19. Community
20. Diversity and continuity
21. Conform and transform
22. Famine
23. Harvest fire
24. Harvest home
25. Gleaning
26. The great chain of being
27. Reaping
28. Harvesting art
29. To create one grass blade
30. Hexameron
31. Radical sabbath
A video reflection by artist Sara Mark
Prof Kate Rigby, Director of the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University, gave a talk about the Daily Bread project in November 2020.
In 2023 the south-facing, sun-drenched curtilage of the church becomes a new Grow Space featuring The Three Sisters (corn, beans and squash) growing on the railings. Many cultures have a version of this staple food combination, which sustainably provides carbohydrates, protein and vitamins/minerals.
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A Triumph of Delights was a month long festival in October 2021 in the lead up to COP26 in Glasgow, providing a variety of spaces to gather in solidarity, and to celebrate the beauty and fragility of our common home.
Aftermath is an ongoing collaborative community project lead by the Eco Team. In 1940 St James’s was badly bomb-damaged. 42 species of ‘weeds’ grew in the nave. We grew the weeds again in the aftermath of Covid, asking what they have to teach us.
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