Come celebrate Lughnasadh; the Gaelic fire festival marking the first grain harvest. Big up the farmers & bakers! We’ll be firing up the earth oven to make & break bread together. Join us for music, chats round the fire, seasonal crafting and delicious tastes from the garden. Bring your own harvest offerings for the Lughnasadh altar and your own rituals of the season to share.
Squash is looking for a talented and enthusiastic freelance cook to support our food team from mid/late June until mid August 2025. We are a community cafe based on Windsor Street in Liverpool 8 with a reputation for delicious vegetarian & vegan food. We also have an award-winning shop that sells our own food products.
We’re interested in a cook with experience working in a busy kitchen and who’s confident preparing vegetarian and vegan food.
Details:
Selected candidates will be offered a paid trial shift sometime in week of 16th June.
To apply, please send your CV and a short letter of introduction explaining why you’d like to work with us at Squash to becky@squashliverpool.co.uk by midday Wednesday 11th June.
Squash Liverpool
112–114 Windsor Street, Liverpool, L8 8EQ
We look forward to hearing from you!
AND…
On solstice Sunday, come and relax in our lush Squash gardens, meet local gardeners & cooks and enjoy delicious food & drinks as part of the National Open Garden Scheme Canning & Toxteth Gardens group. Visit 8 gardens for just £6 including fellow community gardens Granby Winter Garden & Pakistan Association Wellbeing Garden plus private gardens in the area. See https://findagarden.ngs.org.uk/garden/46833/canning-and-toxteth-gardens for more information.
We’re looking forward to welcoming you! The Squash café & shop will be open from 10-5pm for delicious summer refreshments.
Our annual celebration of all things Squash this year falls on Bealtaine Eve so that means planting Squash seeds and dancing…as well as eating, chatting and gathering around the fire to mark the start of summer!
Bealtaine is the Gaelic/Irish crossfire festival next point of the 8-Fold year, sitting half-way between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice, marking the beginning of summer. At Squash, we celebrate this a potent time, when the spring sap is rising, by mixing up more traditional and contemporary folk elements & customs including Maypole dancing*, altar making & nature crafting.
*At lunchtime and in the evening, join in Maypole dancing in the garden and on the street! No experience necessary, just enthusiasm for this traditional fertility folk dance around the Squash mini-Maypole with live music from local band Kaloco (evening set).
In this time of Ramadan, come and break your fast and enjoy delicious food with us. Everyone is welcome whether fasting or not, and all food and drinks are free. Bring sweet treats to share! Prayer space available. Fundraiser for Habibti Liverpool and ‘Soup it Forward’. More info here
Come by and plant up some seeds and seedlings for spring, and take some with you to love at home.
We’re playing out on Windsor Street on Saturday! Come and find us outside Squash for some pavement drawing, chats, spring tasters and more info about the upcoming Micro Farm project!
In this time of Ramadan, come and break your fast and enjoy delicious food with us. There will be dates and water to break fast and prayer space available plus dhal, rice & pakoras. Everyone is welcome whether fasting or not. Bring sweet treats to share!
All food is free of charge / by donation. Any funds raised will be shared between Habibti Liverpool – the amazing local women who raise awareness and resources for Al Sabeen Children’s Hospital in Sanaa, Yemen and Squash’s own ‘Soup-it-Forward’ initiative. If you can’t make it along on Thursday, but would like to donate, please give direct to Habibti here or Squash here.
‘Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.’
-Vandana Shiva, environmental activist and global seed sovereignty advocate.
Our annual seed share is a really important event in the growing year and is the only one of its kind in Merseyside. At Squash, we’re passionate about seed-saving & sharing and have been building the Toxteth Seed Library since 2010 – a fundamental element of our 100 Year Vision for Windsor Street and L8 neighbourhood. Come and meet the Squash gardeners, who are the seed keepers and caretakers of this great legacy.
Every year, seasoned growers and budding beginners join us from across the city region with a shared passion and excitement for the great potential of the simple seed. Come along to pick up some free seeds to grow this spring and if you can, bring seeds you’ve saved to share. Our seed stock is abundant with many varieties of vegetables, herbs & salad with some flowers & wildflowers, nurtured organically with love on Windsor Street.
There’ll also be mindful crafting and art-making with seeds, lead by local crafters and gardeners.
DROP IN / FREE / BY DONATION*
Please note that this is a gentle drop-in with various shared community crafting activities as oppose to full workshops. Space is limited. Come and learn and share your knowledge!
Come by and help celebrate Imbolc, the Irish/Celtic/Gaelic marking of the coming of spring and the first festival of the 8-fold year of 2025. Traditional foods associated with Imbolc are dairy* inc. milk, butter & cheese and grains/bread and will feature at this year’s Imbolc celebration. Help make fresh butter and taste our Squash-made sourdough!
For our gentle annual celebration, we also invite you to join local gardeners, artists & cooks to;
At 1pm we’ll walk together down to bless the spring in the cathedral/St.James gardens; which is known to some as ‘Bridey’s well’ after Imbolc goddess Brigid.
Imbolc, in the Celtic seasonal calendar marks the beginning of the lambing season and signals the start of spring and the stirrings of new life.
It is time for us to let go of the past and look to the future, cleansing out the old, making both outer and inner space for new beginnings. It is a good time for wish-making or making a dedication. – The Goddess & The Green Man.
The wheel has turned once more, returning us to a time of hope and new beginnings. Be thankful for the ever-increasing warmth and light as we leave behind the cold, dark, stillness of winter. – Almanac, Anne Marie Lagram.
In between the middle of the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox lies the Celtic festival of Imbolc. Dating back to pre-Christian times, Imbolc celebrations revolved around the Goddess Brigid. Ancient Celtic mythology explains that she was born with a flame in her head and immediately drank the milk* of a mystical cow upon birth, which is where her common symbols of a flame and dairy originated from. She also represents fertility, and many women would travel to her sacred wells (the most popular one in Kildare, Ireland) to drink their water in hopes of conceiving shortly after. During Imbolc celebrations, those celebrating would light bonfires and make dairy-rich meals in honor of Brigid.
Now, Imbolc coincides with Saint Brigid’s feast day. Historians have shown that when Christianity was spreading throughout Ireland, the church was having a difficult time convincing pagans to let go of their gods and goddesses. Thus, Brigid was “reborn” into Saint Brigid, and her representations (i.e., fertility, the flame, and dairy farmers) were kept the same. – Marisa, Herbstalk
Read more about Goddess Brigid here.
In order to support us, please FOLLOW THIS LINK OVER ON SPACEHIVE You will be asked to sign up to the Spacehive platform and do a 2-part security log-in. From £1 up to whatever you can afford would be amazing or please just offer a ‘like’ or a ‘follow’. Thankyou!
For over a decade we’ve worked to make Windsor Street into a vibrant urban food place inc. a community-designed therapeutic garden, seed library & eco-building housing a community food shop & vegetarian cafe. We’d now like to increase the food-growing space on Windsor Street and provide more opportunities for local people to train in urban agriculture.
We’re grateful to the Liverpool City Region Community Environment Fund for pledging a grant of £23,400 towards this project!
100 Year Street News is a collaborative publication to keep the fires of hope and possibility lit on Windsor Street. Within these pages, you will find artworks, poems and pieces of hope from our network of associate artists, cooks, gardeners and community members who came along to last year’s Autumn Equinox celebration in September. This paper exists to remind us where we’ve been, to build our shared narratives together, and to dream of what’s to come. Read it here!
The 100 Year Street began on Windsor Street in Liverpool L8 with the planting of apple trees in 2010 in our Community Food Garden.
These apple trees, like humans, if well cared for, can live for 100 years, and that is just what we at Squash want to see. We mark each calendar with 8-Fold Year celebrations rooted in Celtic and global traditions that connect us through land-based rituals and encourage neighbours and collaborators to stay grounded in the present while growing towards the future.
While political leaders turn over election cycles and the seasons change on annual rotation, our lives unfold with a flurry of activity, often taking us out of the present to what fire needs to be put out first. It is often the urgency of our daily lives and the times we are living in that prevent us from long-term thinking and building the world we want to live in. We all must be called to the greatest crises of our time; the deep inequality of our species and the collapse of our shared home, planet Earth.
Climate change is here, but how we adapt to it, how we build a more just world with our neighbours and how we create the relationships we can rely on, no matter the storms that come, requires tender collaboration and care. By tending to our street, our gardens and our communities throughout the year, we set into motion the network of care that can hold us. The Earth transforms in the seasons. How can we begin to transform our neighbourhoods as well?
Our 100 year street vision is a framework and an invitation to
Over the last decade or so, Squash has created a space where belonging sits at the center of our work. From artist workshops to free soup, from plant knowledge to solidarity fundraisers, we are attempting to build the kind of relationships that people & places need most. How would our neighbourhoods, cities and countries transform if we began to put long-term thinking at the heart of how we come together, what we decide and what we make happen?
100 Year Street News Project By Designer Corbin LaMont & Social Artist & Squash Co-Director Clare Owens
100 Year Street News Design By Corbin LaMont
100 Year Street News was inspired by The Changing Times & the ‘Hearsay’
