Gardener who grew food for struggling families has allotment ruined in salt attack

Vandals broke onto an allotment where a volunteer was growing food to give to people struggling with the cost of living – and poured salt over the land to stop anything being cultivated there.

Carly Burd wept as she explained how she was heartbroken by what had been done.

She had transformed her garden in Harlow, Essex, into an allotment to provide free organic fruit and vegetables to those on benefits, pensioners people on low incomes.

But Ms Burd said someone had jumped over the wall in the night and poured salt over the soil.

“It means everything I’ve planted won’t grow,” she said through her tears. “And I can’t replant on it because it won’t grow.

“So all the hours and hours and hours of work we’ve put in is now dead. And they’ve done it everywhere.”

In video footage of the allotment, salt can be seen in lines across the surface.

Ms Burd, who has multiple sclerosis and lupus and is herself on disability benefit, said she had fed 1,613 people during the cost-of-living crisis. She makes food boxes comprising homegrown fruit and veg, as well as staples such as rice and pasta.

She made all the planters from old wood and grows everything from seed in her allotment.

Addressing the vandals who sabotaged it, she said: “How could you do that - literally? I hope it makes you happy, I really do.

“Top person. But you know what? You won’t stop me,” she vowed.

“Because I’ll just pick it all up and carry on.

“OK I can’t plant here but you won’t stop me whatsoever.”

After Ms Burd’s video was published on TikTok, donations to her online fundraising page for her project, called A Meal on Me, began pouring in, and reached about four times her initial target of £4,000.