The Bakery Blog
The bakery story
In 2015, we started growing wheat in the gardens. Led by Scotland the Bread, the Soil to Slice project was asking communities to help work out how we could start growing Scottish heritage grains, varieties grown everywhere until 100 years ago and said to be more nutritious and more delicious than modern grains.
With our first harvest, we found the latter to be perfectly true. We cut the wheat by hand, then threshed it, cleaned it and milled it with the help of Scotland the Bread, and started baking. Baking with the flour that we had grown on a street corner was an inspiration. We started a monthly Bread Club, where all are welcome to come and experiment with the flour, and learn some baking skills.
The amount of grain we can grow in Granton will never be enough to supply a whole bakery, and we have discovered that processing it into flour is tricky (the mice were grateful for our neglectful storage last year, but we're learning...!) For now we are baking with Scotland the Bread's own organic heritage flour from Fife, and that from Gilchesters Farm near Newcastle. In time, we aim to include a little stoneground Granton flour in every Granton loaf.
