Milestone year for Garvald Bakery, supporting people with learning disabilities

14th June 2019

The Friday Market was once again bustling with parents, teachers, and pupils chatting away in the long queue for the bakery. The Garvald (West Linton) stall is in its 10^th year of setting out its various delights: organic breads, homemade donuts, lemon drizzle cake, vegan tbc, warm sweet potato & carrot pasties and more.

Rising at 5am to begin putting together dozens of recipes, Director Mike Casey says ‘Nothing was as it is now eight hours ago, it was just ingredients. Everything is made fresh for the day’.

Inspired by the ideas of the educator and philosopher, Rudolf Steiner, Garvald is a charity that offers social therapy, creative opportunities and support for people with learning disabilities. This year, it celebrates its 50^th year of operating in Edinburgh.

The school has a long-standing connection with Garvald. Many of our community are customers of Garvald Edinburgh’s Mulberry Bush, buying Waldorf Steiner gifts, books and materials; our pupils, as part of their farming main lesson in Class 3 spend day trips followed by a two-week stay on Garvald Home Farm (West Linton) in Class 9, milking cows, harvesting crops and experiencing the daily life on a working bio dynamic farm .

Rudolf Steiner was one of the first people in the modern era to recognize explicitly the principles of inter-connectedness in relation to farming, and to describe the links between the fertility of the soil and the health of plants, animals and people.