From Lockdown Gardening to Community Composting: How Generation Soil Began

In early 2021, I moved to Bristol to begin an MSc in Sustainable Development in Practice at the University of the West of England.

It was lockdown. Shops were quiet. Streets were empty. The world felt paused.

I was living in a basement flat with my best friend.

Luckily, it had a garden.

We started growing food in the most unremarkable way possible. Bags of compost on the patio. Chemical fertiliser from the supermarket round the corner. No regenerative framework. No systems thinking. Just an urge to grow something while everything else felt suspended.

It is not how I grow now.

But it was the beginning of Generation Soil.

Asking Practical Questions About Food Systems

Between lectures, I became increasingly drawn to food systems. Not abstract sustainability, but practical, grounded questions:

• Where does our food come from?

• Where does our food waste go?

• What does soil actually need to stay alive?

Two years earlier, in 2019, I had fractured my skull. Recovery was slow and my mental health declined sharply. During that time, I started reading about the gut–brain axis and the relationship between microbes and mood.

That led me to fermentation.

I made my first batch of sauerkraut.

Cabbage. Salt. Time.

It felt like participation rather than observation. Like working with something living instead of trying to control it.

That small act shifted something.

From Fermentation to Soil Health

I began documenting what I was learning. I posted my first reel. What started as lockdown boredom became deep focus.

I went down the wormhole.

Working at Better Food, completing the Square Food Foundation “How to Be a Chef” course, and spending six months in the kitchen at Windmill Hill City Farm exposed me to Bristol’s food scene from the inside.

At the city farm, I watched fresh produce arrive from the market garden just outside. It moved through the kitchen. It became meals. Raw scraps were wheelbarrowed back out for composting on site.

But plate waste was shipped somewhere else.

That question stayed with me.

Where was it going?

Why did some nutrients return to soil while others left the system entirely?

That question sits at the heart of regenerative food systems and how we design local nutrient loops.

You can read more about how we think about this in our article on Why Bigger Isn’t Always Better in Food Systems.

Discovering Bokashi Composting

During my academic research, I came across bokashi composting.

The idea that beneficial microbes could ferment food waste before composting it. That citrus, onions, meat, dairy, eggs and cooked food were not inherently uncompostable, just biologically misunderstood.

I began questioning the list of things that supposedly could not be composted.

It wasn’t about breaking rules.

It was about understanding biology.

Today, that learning informs how we run the Bristol Living Compost Project, where food waste is fermented, composted, and returned to soil within the same city.

Soil Health, Nutrition and Circular Food Systems

Before starting the MSc, I had been delivering food education workshops in primary schools with Chartwells Schools, part of Compass Group UK & Ireland. The focus was nutrition.

Important work. But I was increasingly interested in the bigger picture.

Soil health influences the nutritional density of our food. If we are not replenishing soil, what happens over time?

I developed my first circular food workshops at Young Bristol. Not just what we eat, but where it comes from and where it returns.

This became the foundation of our workshops, where composting and soil biology are explored through practice rather than instruction.

Building Local Nutrient Loops in Bristol

Five years later, Generation Soil is collecting food waste from 67 local businesses and households across Bristol.

Not to remove it from sight.

But to keep it close. To turn it into living compost. To return it to soil within the same city.

Community-scale composting allows people to see where their food waste goes. It builds soil health locally. It strengthens regenerative food systems.

Regeneration only makes sense when the loop is visible.

You can learn more about how our community composting in Bristol works here.

We are now establishing a two-acre food forest market garden in Bristol. Our first seeds are in the ground. Spring is close.

Microbes Are Everywhere

Recently, I peeled carrots. The skins are now submerged in sugary water, slowly becoming carrot vinegar. The grated roots are fermenting with salt.

Microbes are everywhere.

On our food.

On our skin.

In our gut.

In our soil.

Looking back, the pattern is clearer.

Growing food in compost bags during lockdown.

Fermenting cabbage in a quiet kitchen.

Questioning where plate waste goes.

Learning to compost what I had been told could not be composted.

Building local nutrient loops in Bristol.

They were not separate interests.

They were fragments of the same system.

Those dots turned into a circle.

And in practice, that circle is still widening.

If you’d like to be part of that circle, you can join the Bristol Living Compost Project here.