Ediculture is an educational trust dedicated to promoting regenerative food culture. It has been a registered charity since 1999, evolving out of the Sheffield Organic Food Initiative.
Ediculture’s main activities have been based at Coed Rural Art Space since 2017.
We have run hundreds of courses, workshops and talks over the years in the Coed Gardens, ranging from foraging, through to cooking on open fires, permaculture design through to passing on plant craft skills. Ediculture lies at the centre of a whole range of subjects that interrelate, and weave together in a natural learning cycle, which we call the 8 phases of Ediculture.
Our Vision for the Festival
We have for many years now attended festivals through the permaculture and land based areas, running wild food walks, talks, herbal medicine tents, and demonstrating basic skills in growing. Our underlying feeling was that it was great to be getting the word out to people about some basic skills around food and food culture to the wider culture, but it always felt quite unsustainable to be traveling all that way across the country, to land which often has very little permanent infrastructure dedicated to growing and food culture. We therefore wanted to start to practice what we preach, and set up a gathering where can demonstrate the skills in action, and people can come and see first hand and most importantly taste and eat the produce from the land grown in regenerative ways.
We can do this at Coed, where we have been running events for over 20 years, have established a 13 year old forest garden, vegetable gardens which have been established for over 20 years. And also important to our heart is the presence of the living community who manage the land and buildings on site. We want to demonstrate how all these things come together in a radically different way of relating to one another and the land, through low impact, simplistic and minimalistic ways of living. By including the community on site in the whole design of the festival, we can tangibly move towards a more sustainable festival.
Keeping it small
This year we are only selling 250 tickets. We want to keep it small for a number of reasons. Small local gatherings give more time and space for people to drop in to being with one another, make more personal connections, and give the space for us to really host well. Also its our first year and we welcome your help in getting the word out, and helping us to sell tickets. Its no easy feat getting a new gathering off the ground, but with your support and help we can do it.
Ediculture: A future vision for festivals
We are perhaps at a time when large gatherings will begin to loose their appeal, as the consciousness expansion agenda of the hippy movement in the 60’s and 70’s, demonstrated through Woodstock and Glastonbury festivals, reach a point whereby to further its evolution, it must give rise to smaller gatherings of people more rooted to the land on which they celebrate, giving the opportunity to not only sing and dance about connecting to nature and the land, but to truly live it.
To find out more about Ediculture and the work we do, please visit –
