The Community Farm
The Community Farm is a not-for-profit, organic farm that delivers nourishing food across the local area. We aim to grow community as much as we grow food. Every year we welcome more than 1,500 people onto the land for wellbeing courses, social events and volunteering sessions overlooking Chew Valley Lake, just south of Bristol.
At The Community Farm we offer three wellbeing courses, Grow and Make, Wild Steps and Lakeside Wellbeing. These courses sit alongside each other, offering different routes to improved wellbeing for different people with different needs and interests. You can either come to the full course or to one-off days.
Grow and Make, our therapeutic horticulture course, runs on Wednesdays and is underpinned by the Five Ways to Wellbeing: Give, Take Notice, Connect, Be Active and Keep Learning. Every week you’ll learn more about what you can do in the garden and how it connects with the wider webs of life around you. Together, we will nurture and be nurtured by our vegetable patch and forest garden through practical activities supported by theory sessions. We sow, tend and harvest veg and fruit from The Farm, forage in our hedgerows and learn about herbal teas and balms.
Wild Steps, our therapeutic conservation course, runs on Thursdays and is framed by the 5 Pathways to Nature Connectedness*: Contact, Beauty, Emotions, Compassion and Meaning. These sessions allow you to experience relaxation in a safe and supportive space, foster a sense of community and develop greater awareness of how our connectedness to other life benefits our own wellbeing. You’ll have the opportunity to develop a range of practical conservation skills for instance hedge-laying, tree and wildflower planting/sowing, building and construction and pond maintenance to care for a mixture of habitats on the farm. These activities are combined with mindfulness, natural crafts, campfire cooking, folklore and seasonal celebrations.
Lakeside Wellbeing, our therapeutic mindfulness, creativity and movement is run on Mondays by our longstanding wellbeing partner, Ecowild. This course will support your physical and mental health through nourishing wellbeing practices in The Farm’s beautiful setting. The morning will involve nature connection, active practice such as a walk, gentle stretching, and mindfulness practice whilst the afternoon will be for creative practice, including a variety of nature crafts and opportunity for reflection together.
Course dates and booking information can all be found on our website: Wellbeing Courses - The Community Farm