Grass by the sackful

There is a community orchard near my house in Sunniside which I helped set up three years ago. It has about 40 trees on it. The grass around the trees is not cut by the council (Gateshead Council owns the site) and as you can see from the photo, there is plenty of it. I am hoping to arrange an action day so that volunteers can cut the grass, at least around the base of the trees. In the meantime, I am going to the orchard every day to pick a sack of grass for the goats. This is free food which addresses the problem of how to ensure as much as possible of the resources I use are produced sustainably and locally. It's all very well to produce our own milk and eggs, but if the fodder for the livestock has to be bought and brought in from afar, our underlying principles are partly undermined. The trick now is to harvest and store this wild fodder crop for use during the lean months of winter and early spring.