Daily Bread

Church Window Mask
Wheat

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

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  • 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.

    Downloadable Reflections

    Reflections about our wheat, with art by Sara Mark, poetry by Diane Pacitti and scientific input by Deborah Colvin.

    Select documents

    Daily Bread

    1. Fallow

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    2. Scatter

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    3. Germinate

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    4. Springing

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    5. Rising

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    6. Heaven and Earth

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    7. Tillering

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    8. Breadth

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    9. Blakefull

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    10. Rogation

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    11. Elongation

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    12. Expecting

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    13. Flowering

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    14. Extraordinary

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    15. Adamah and Eve

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    16. How to Harvest

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    17. Lammas

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    18. Soil

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    19. Community

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    20. Diversity and continuity

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    21. Conform and transform

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    22. Famine

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    23. Harvest fire

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    24. Harvest home

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    25. Gleaning

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    26. The great chain of being

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    27. Reaping

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    28. Harvesting art

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    29. To create one grass blade

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    30. Hexameron

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    31. Radical sabbath

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    Grain of Hope: Slice of Heaven

    A video reflection by artist Sara Mark

    Kate Rigby Lecture

    Resilience, Religion & the Arts

    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.