Food campaigner giving out free meals has allotment “destroyed” overnight as vandals poured salt over the land to stop anything from being cultivated there.

Carly Burd 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.

In tears, she said: “It means everything I’ve planted won’t grow. 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 are now dead.”

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.