Conservation, history, green living and local self-sufficiency are the priorities for these volunteers.

All | Charlotte | Jessica | Laura

Wednesday Mar 24, 2010

Boldly going where no wheelbarrow has gone for a while

'This is a bicycle shop'. That was the puzzled response from the man behind the counter as I came in, knee-deep in wellies pushing a wheelbarrow, wearing gardening gloves. One thing it clearly wasn't, was a wheelbarrow shop. I'd arrived at the North London shop via Finsbury Park's most congested road looking like I belonged far, far away in the countryside. This was a high point of the weekend, and had me giggling like a child.

 

Working in community gardening projects, I have found to my amusement, often requires some imaginative thinking, and with a flat-tyred wheelbarrow and ten tonnes of soil to shift, there was only one option.

 

Two men had arrived shortly after we started ploughing into the improbable twin peaks of topsoil and dark, steaming (yes, hot and steaming) compost lying on the grass beside the children's nursery. These two brought fresh muscles and the wheelbarrow in question, but after several backbreaking barrowloads, driving the heavy earth up the plank ramp into the planters, enough was enough. After a few gentle pleas for anyone with a pump, I decided to put one of my special skills to use.

 

Heading from the safe confines of the park, I trundled out in mud-streaked jeans to the busy Saturday streets of Seven Sisters Road. I truly felt, passing the tube station and walking under the railway bridges amid the roar of noisy traffic that I had been transported inexplicably from a day on the farm straight into the heart of London.

 

Being a cyclist, and being woefully inadequate with any form of pump I have become expert at asking bicycle shops very nicely for all sorts of advice and use of their pumps, and to their credit they always come up trumps, and often do it for me if I do the job badly enough. Today, however, after some advice on the optimal tyre pressure for a wheelbarrow I took the barrow onto the street and carried out the operation myself.

 

To my surprise not only did the air go into the tyre, it stayed in there and I got it to the correct pressure, removing the pump to find everything was still in tact. Returning triumphantly along the busy streets we dug like crazy with a full complement of wheelbarrows.

Several hours later, exhausted and well into the drizzling afternoon we had filled eight large planters with soil and compost, and all the fruit shrubs and herbs were planted.

 

Standing back and admiring our work, the last few tired gardeners contempleted what they will look like as they grow, covering the fence, and sheilding the children from the distant but ever-present road. It is such an excellent, big space, tucked away in a corner of the park, shaded by huge London Planes with so much potential, it was really satisfying to nudge it from a two-dimensional grassy area to something which nurtures the growth of some beautiful, edible plants.

 

Hopefully generations of toddlers and their parents will be able to tend the trees and bushes as they grow, enjoying the fruit, and taking an important step to understanding their food and how easily they can grow it themselves.

Perhaps they'll even be driving their own wheelbarrows soon.

Posted by Laura ( 4:50 PM )
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Wednesday Feb 17, 2010

We came, we dug, we conquered

Weilding a mattock like a lame but determined workman wasn't the obvious choice of activity for this year's Valentine's day, but I embraced it nonetheless. Waking up grumpy from a long week involving too much work and not enough sleep, I arrived with trepidation at the portacabin of choice. Not for the first time the kindly and ever-inviting host/station supervisor made cups of tea, coaxing my sleepy head to life.

We chatted for a while until a few more people arrived, and eventually we poured out of the cabin like clowns out of a mini, to get to work. We unloaded Jo's granny trolley with spades, forks, lopping shears and the mighty mattock, all kindly loaned from BTCV (the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers). The only man among us went at a Mallow stump with the kind of gusto you can't help but admire, especially as he had not had much sleep either. There was no stopping him after that.

I started more slowly at one of the buddleias with a fork, trying to lever it straight out of the ground, and soon realised the only thing likely to give was the fork. Then I was introduced to the mattock. Essentially a sculpted post with a double-edged and fairly blunt axe on one end, it's amazing for rattling through unsuspecting soil at a rate of knots. In the right hands. In my hands it smacked into the ground with surprisingly little effect for quite a bit of effort. While I was a sorry excuse for a digger, Jo, a lot smaller in frame than me, was an impressive excavating machine. I thought I'd make up for my lack of mattock prowess by murmuring enthusiastic approval at her efforts. Yes, I was the cheerleading party.

As the land had been abandoned for so long the plants which had taken root there made it abundantly clear they weren't about to give up without a fight. Many had roots like the trunk of a small tree, and pulling them up was like an archaeological dig teamed with a war of wills. Digging down, you work out which direction the root goes, and start chopping off the underground branches. Then when it's all wobbly you heave and twist and hack (and maybe curse a little), and I even jumped up and down on one, while holding onto a nearby lamp post to stop myself breaking an ankle, before finally holding up the slain shrub like a victorious warrior. At least I hoisted it as far as my shoulder, it was extremely heavy.

The land cleared, we tied back a bramble we're hoping to cultivate for blackberries, we swept away litter to discover an old path and before long the space looked about twice its original size. With rainclouds looming we went off for a big lunch at a local cafe, and next week we hope to finally plant our trees.

After all the preparation, endless email strings and general co-ordination of efforts it seems like the end of a little era is approaching, but I feel really proud to have championed an idea that became something tangible, and that hopefully a lot of people will enjoy in the years to come.

Posted by Laura ( 12:00 PM )
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Tuesday Feb 02, 2010

Finding my career through volunteering

I lost count of the times people told me: 'Journalism is so competitive.' 'You'll never make it,' they might as well have said.

This week I'm glad I followed my heart, because I've just been given two more commissions to write articles for a national publication about what I love: the environment and green food production.

It's interesting at the turn of a new decade to look back and see how the decisions I've made carved a path to where I am today. I decided in 2005 after years of doing jobs where I felt unmotivated, that I needed do what I felt passionate about if I wanted to be happy. I decided journalism was for me: I love writing and I love to learn and to share my knowledge with others.

After finishing my degree and a journalism course I worked unpaid in various publications for almost a year, filling in the gaps with part-time temping jobs. Although the hours were changeable and pay varied from month to month, I decided it was worth it to pursue my dream - this was now the only thing I was willing to settle for.

Trying out things that I was interested in gave me invaluable experience, and contacts. Even in 12 months volunteering has focused my career ambitions.

Last January I applied for an internship at The Ecologist magazine. I wasn't sure, when they finally called me up with a month-long full-time slot, whether I wanted this. Luckily friends told me just go for it, I hadn't done environmental stuff before and it would show I'm adaptable. After all, my degree was in nutrition. Good advice, I thought.

During that month I uploaded archive articles on The Ecologist's website about anything from deep sea fishing methods and their impact on fish stocks, to the often toxic chemicals used in furniture and textiles production. I was hooked. What these people were writing about felt like what I wanted from life, it felt like by highlighting these issues these writers were really making a difference. After that there was no turning back.

After I'd finished there an old journalism lecturer sent out an email about a communications internship with the London Cycling Campaign. I'd done some work for them a year or two before, and liked what they did so I called them up and went along for an interview. I spent the next six months working one day a week as their newsletter editor interviewing people, writing news stories and uploading articles on the website. It was great experience, with amazing people. Through this work I made a contact at the Guardian and ended up writing a piece for their Bike Blog. After 11 months of working for free this was my first paid article.

I loved the idea of writing freelance: the fact you can choose what to write about, and for whom. I had been pitching story ideas at various publications for months, without success. It was really daunting and the 'Thanks but no thanks' weren't easy to deal with. Finally, last month I pitched a couple to The Ecologist, and they were accepted. It finally started to feel like all that work was paying off.

If I hadn't developed such a passion for the environment through my volunteer work I wouldn't have found out about the events and projects I am now writing about (I won't give the game away until they're finished, though). The various groups and events I have got involved in have made for good writing practice, even if no-one accepted the articles!

I remember thinking towards the end of last year: wouldn't it be amazing if I could be paid to write about all these amazing projects, and suddenly, it's happening. I know it's early days still and there's a long way to go, but it feels like a really good start.

The same people who said: 'You'll never make it' will probably say: 'You're lucky.' After all that hard work, though, I know different.

Posted by Laura ( 10:00 AM )
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Monday Dec 14, 2009

A land of random vegetables

I don't mean heart-shaped lettuces or carrots with two legs and a head, though I am tempted to attend the Feeding the 5000 event in Trafalgar Square on Wednesday, a free food event featuring odd-shaped veg that would otherwise been thrown away for not being a uniform size/shape. 

No, Transport for London (TfL) is joining the Capital Growth scheme, providing more land for food growing projects like mine across London (and hopefully a new era for amusingly-shaped veg!). The scheme's aim is to provide 2012 food growing spaces by 2012, all run by enthusiastic community gardeners (like me).

Reading into it a bit more I was surprised at just how much land TfL has in London. It's like a wealthy old aunt who's been sitting on a neat and not insignificant pile of cash all these years and you never had any idea. But when you add it up it makes sense.

TfL owns an estimated 10% of wildlife habitat in London. If you don't live in London you may not realise but further out of the city where floor space isn't so scarce the tube lines emerge from their claustrophobic pipes and and some points during the day you get sunlight and such surprising joys as the odd pigeon boarding the train. They waddle on to savour morsels of left-over snacks before hopping out again before the doors shut.

The other joy for a daydreamer like me is that you get to gaze out of the tube windows and marvel at various green bits of London, my favourite being on the District line to Kew Gardens where you actually cross the river. It's beyond exciting, I can tell you. When you think about it though, the green spaces that straddle the tracks are a perfect wildlife corridor, a network of greenery across London.

Thanks to TfL joining Capital Growth there is now a fruit and veg growing plot above Southwark station, which will be tended by locals in a nearby block of flats. Capital Growth is offering funds to support people who have such food growing schemes. I love the idea of growing your veg in unlikely places, it's a little bit anarchic, like saying "people live here and care about this place." Maybe more wealthy aunts will come forward and decide to get their hands dirty, too.

The thought that you could just come across a rogue cucumber or patch of radishes when out walking the dog or going about your daily commute is brilliant!

Posted by Laura ( 12:29 PM )
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Thursday Dec 10, 2009

Making the environment profitable

The way to get the environment to figure in the minds of society is to make it profitable. This is the important lesson I learned today in a meeting with Hackney council.

Hackney is a very young borough. Great, you may think: more vibrant...that's what I thought. Right but wrong.

Due to a massive migrant influx in the last ten years, 29% of Hackney's population is now under 19. That means almost 1/3 of Hackney's residents are in education, which needs funding. If this isn't adequately funded, young people have poor job prospects, which leads to unemployment, which leads to crime. In my borough, youth crime and worklessness are the key council spending priorities, due to Hackney's demographic.

It is hugely important that young people have a chance to make something of themselves, as joblessness in young adults can leave lasting scars and end up costing society, too. This really drove home to me how and why the environment can get sidelined.

But then I thought: this could be a great opportunity for the environment, too.

I felt frustrated that the government bailed out the car industry when they should have taken the brave step of investing in green technologies. Why not help the clean industry of the future, not the dirty ones which use too many resources and frankly haven't made much of an effort to move with the times. The new VW Beetle, for example, does the same miles per gallon as the original model, made in 1945. That's the car industry's progress for you.

What we should be doing is putting our money where our mouth is and saying: 'Goodbye old dirty industry, hello new greener, cleaner, happier way of living.' Kapow. And why shouldn't we? It's our planet, after all, and as far as I can judge, the self-interested big business of the past should have no part in that.

Why not use all those young people needing work to provide a workforce to get a new green scheme off the ground? We need to start our green economy now, if it's going to work.

I attended this meeting out of sheer speculative interest, after the council advertised for community representatives from the voluntary sector.

This was a training day on how to successfully lobby the council to forward the interest of community groups. When I look around Hackney, I see a lot of dirty streets clogged with dirty traffic, but that also means there's a lot of room for improvement. The environment here does need a voice. It's just a case of whether it can be made profitable on a community scale.

Hackney wasn't prepared for the sudden influx of a young population,. This caused a massive spending deficit which the borough is only just recovering from. If we can be prepared and use this demographic to our advantage somehow, we would be laughing.

Posted by Laura ( 4:46 PM )
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Thursday Nov 19, 2009

Pioneering and squishing apples

Groups of rosy-faced people tramping round up to their calves in apples in a giant wooden vat. A pastoral scene from the middle ages? No, my fantasy image of our local train station come Autumn next year.

OK, you can't press apples by foot, maybe I was thinking of grapes. Either way, I'm excited as we've just been given the go-ahead to use a large section of unused land down the side of my old train station to grow apple trees.

After weeks of arranging and rearranging, with everyone being too busy I finally met with Sarah, the station delivery manager for North London Lines. She's not only agreed to turn over a patch of land to us for the project, her company will pay for the trees! We're awaiting risk assessments and are making estimates on how much they will cost, and if all goes well we should be digging the place up by the end of December!

It turns out we're pioneers. Although the company has wanted to get involved in community projects for months we are their first success story. Already Sarah's telling us about other stations with even more space which need a similar group with some ideas. It's really exciting that other people may be encouraged to follow in our footsteps.

Anyway, having handed over the original greenhouses project to a more experienced group member it's nice to be barking up a different fruit tree, and having some success. After all these months of community involvement my life just wouldn't be the same without it.

I've mentioned the idea of planting fruit trees at rail stations as a good way of exposing people to theidea of producing their own food. I really want to keep nurturing this idea, to show people where our food comes from and that the environment we live in should be one that is healthy enough for us to grow the food we eat.

I can't wait to get down there with spades and gloves and actually plant some trees! Now we just have to think of what we can do with the apples once they're harvested. Obviously we want them to go back to the community, so apple pressing is a distinct possibility, then we would give out the juice to the neighbourhood.

I expect people are more likely to turn up with empty bottles than bare feet and rosy cheeks, though.

Posted by Laura ( 3:34 PM )
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Wednesday Oct 28, 2009

Heading East and remembering my roots

It's been a while since my last post as I've been battling Swine Flu, taking belated summer holidays and moving house. London is a transient place, but when I told the people in my Transition Town I was moving East they all tried to pursuade me to stay!

In fact the last time I saw them I was on my way to meet my new housemates. Jo and I visited my potential growing project to try and think up a solution to the non-progress that was being made. It felt like a handover: we spoke with the woman who runs some courses there and Jo realised that if she went straight to the owners of the site it may be possible to organise something concrete. In retrospect it needed someone with her rational mind and experience and she got on to the housing trust straight away.

Afterwards we met up with a family from Texas who wanted to start a Transition Town in Houston. They are faced with a city literally divided by a big freeway, between the rich and poor sides of town. It seems almost impossible to set up communities there due to the urban sprawl where every trip is a car journey to the centre of town and little satellite shopping districts are virtually non-existent. This is a stark contrast to London where pockets of communities mean people can shop and live locally without relying on cars.

We sat in the park and discussed the challenges of this before I said goodbye. This ties quite nicely with our meeting tonight on local transport. I'm really looking forward to seeing my old community again, they really started to feel like a family! As an avid cyclist and being anti-car it's also an issue I'm really interested in.

In the meantime I have to think about finding a new local community. A woman I knew from another environmental group recently gave me a web link to an umbrella group called Hackney Environment Forum. I've been trawling the website, which has a wealth of events in my area, and I've already decided to continue my food growing passion and volunteer in a tree nursery and edible forest garden project. If you live in London and you're interested in the environment a really useful site, which lists all the environmental projects happening around the city, is http://greenmap.london21.org.

I personally can't wait to get stuck in to some planting again! 

Posted by Laura ( 5:06 PM )
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Tuesday Sep 22, 2009

Arsenal's enchanted forest

I went to a local festival last weekend to help on our Transition Town stall. You have to be a local to find the place, tucked away in a tiny park behind Arsenal tube station. At least I thought it was a tiny park. I wandered through its gates to find a community centre full of brick-a-brac stalls, a few septuagenarians who were obviously running the show, and absolutely no-one else in sight.

I left again, disappointed, after someone asked if maybe I was in the wrong place. Back outside a scrambly path led into some woods with the kind of unkemptness you'd normally reserve for the middle of the countryside, and might not want to go into.

It was only when a woman in her forties hurried past brandishing a cake I realised I must be on the right track. "Where are you going?" I ventured. "To the festival," she said. This was becoming like a something from Rupert the Bear. With childlike glee I scurried off after her.

The sound of singing became gradually louder before a clearing appeared in the trees. A hundred or so people were congregated about stalls and a stage, complete with warbly folk music, and I stood in surprise for a while gazing at the intimidating pastoral before me, cake stand and all, in the heart of North London.

Morris dancing and dogs with bells on

It was all a bit much for a sleepy Saturday afternoon and with Jo nowhere in sight I was about to make my escape, when I noticed some more stalls along a woodland path behind me. As I walked that way I discovered some Morris dancers in full swing, with bells and leaps (and disconcerting grunts). I watched for a while, suddenly whisked back to my Somerset childhood, and chuckled at some children's reaction to the scene. It was really wonderful to watch, like looking back into Britain's ancient history. Later on I bumped into one of the dancers and his dog, fully kitted out with red braces and three little bells. "Ooh, is that a Morris dog?" I asked, rather excitedly.

Jo eventually emerged from the direction of the tea building and we talked about what we were going to do with the greenhouse project. Following the recent sticking point she offered to lend her expertise on funding, and we're going to meet the centre's staff on Thursday to see if we can collectively get something off the ground.

Tea and energy saving

While sipping the obligatory tea in the community building I met a man from the council's energy saving department. We chatted about how his work is portrayed by the local media while simultaneously laughing at the Morris dog which had been left tied to a door. What a surreal afternoon.

Pic: Martin our local "green vicar", Jo and me

I left feeling a bit more optimistic about the work ahead and like I'd discovered some secret and enchanted part of where I live. Not to mention a sense of how wonderfully quirky my community really is.

Posted by Laura ( 11:09 AM )
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Friday Sep 11, 2009

Slow and steady wins the fruit trees

Things can take forever with charities. Our arguably brilliant idea of using a local training centre to teach people to grow their own food has fallen on the backburner for the time being, if not fallen off the agenda altogether.

The horticultural centre, complete with lots of unused land and greenhouses – and one entirely unused polytunnel (basically a big plastic sheet stretched over a series of semi-circular frames) – is ideal for the job of teaching city dwellers some food-growing basics. Unfortunately the lottery funding application has ground to a halt, and may not be granted at all.

I realised when I had the initial conversations with the staff there how much I took my country upbringing for granted. I had grand images of rows upon rows of carefully-selected veg, each fruiting so something was edible at all times of the year. I forgot that so many people who live in high rise flats probably don't even know where half the food they eat comes from, let alone how you make a plant thrive. For now at least I have to leave this project to its own devices, and face the fact we may not get the funding we hoped for.

Still, I have other ideas up my sleeve. I contacted one of our other possible planting zones – the local London Overground station. It's actually one of my favourite potential projects as it was my idea and I'd love to see it work. There's so much unused outdoor space there, and big grassy, overgrown banks which would look really nice with some pear and apple trees on them. A few of London's stations have green-fingered staff who plant colourful hanging baskets, but many have only acres of bare concrete.

A station is a great place to engage people with food growing, though. Plus plants are protected from vandalism, hopefully. The station manager is really enthusiastic about the idea: he grows veg at home, and when I first visited him we sat down in his tiny portakabin office and he made me tea in a little plastic cup. I contacted his supervisor and she's really keen on the idea.  

The good thing about this contingency plan is that companies like TfL provide funds to support community projects such as this, and they like their staff to be involved too. It sounds almost too good to be true, but we'll see...

Posted by Laura ( 1:35 PM )
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Friday Sep 04, 2009

Guerrilla Gardening expedition

I'm on the far left.We rebuilt the bench we're sitting on as it was missing all it's wooden slats

Posted by Laura ( 2:56 PM )
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Friday Aug 14, 2009

Discard after use

The news made me happy recently as it seems food wastage is finally getting a bit of airtime. The government is saying supermarkets should ban bogofs (buy-one-get-one-frees) as it encourages people to throw away food. Not only this, but they say more people should be growing their own food.

As a nation we throw away a third of the food we buy, and I have no idea how someone manages to achieve this. I feel bad enough discarding the odd errant jar of mouldering pesto from the back of the fridge.

I guess that's another good thing about growing your own food, that you realise just how much love and often frustration goes into creating the food we eat. I'll admit my own growing efforts have been fraught with errors, through being busy with jobs, and often forgetting to water the plants. Also, ironically, because I unwittingly sowed enough lettuce to make even a ravenous goat baulk.

Lettuce army

I suspected at the time that a lot of them wouldn't even germinate, let alone make it to lettuce-hood. But make it they did, and now I'm faced with the problem of how to make good use of  my lettuce army, peeking out at me in eerie formation from their ranks of pots around the back door.

I have to face it: there's too many of the blighters.

But, no sooner was I having lettuce neglect nightmares than a solution came to hand. Eagle-eyed readers may recall my jaunts on the A10 a few weeks ago, where some Transitioners and I guerrilla-planted foodstuffs into an all-but abandoned planter. Well, some little so-and-so has taken a fancy to some of the smaller edibles and made off with them.

Lettuce to the rescue?

A bit of a waste, you might think, to replant an area targeted by peckish vandals. After all, a person prefers to eat more than once a day and they're bound to get hungry again. Following some consideration, though, we thought: "Why let them win?" If the planters seem like they're being maintained, someone may think twice about pilfering the veg again.

So I'm hoping my lettuce won't go to waste: I'm about to go down there now and install them in their new home. I've become slightly attached to Geoff, Bill, Alfred, etc, so I expect I'll be down there regularly to see if they're OK, not too thirsty, etc.

Lettuce do it...(sorry)

I recently gave a friend who lives in a block of flats one of my lettuces (a pure act of kindness, of course). She was so impressed by how low-maintenance it is that she's now talking about growing more food. Hooray for her I say, as she proves that even on a small scale we can all grow something for dinner.

It would be great if more people could learn to rely more on locally-produced food; perhaps even stuff they've grown themselves. Then we could rely less on food being transported halfway across the world, only to stand a one-in-three chance of being thrown away.

Posted by Laura ( 12:00 AM )
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Tuesday Aug 04, 2009

The art of growing your own - and managing projects

It seems you start doing something - copious amounts of gardening in my case - and suddenly you're inundated with offers to do more of it. Not only have I had soil and seedlings coming out of my ears for the last month or two (plant swap, anyone?), with both mine and my group's plants, but last week I started a new part time job where I was swiftly packed off to North Kensington to do some volunteer gardening as a team building exercise.

After disembarking the train I misdirected an old lady (having all the best intentions but - lets face it - less than perfect map reading skills) twice before abandoning my do-good quest and admitting my error(s). Never mind, I soon found the gardens, perched right alongside the Grand Union Canal in glorious sunshine.

Soon after I arrived and while organising tools I got chatting to Joey, the gardens' sole employee, about a project I've taken on in a small plot of land in North London, where I'm hoping to get people with no space and growing knowledge to learn some basic food growing skills. Smallest of small worlds, it turns out he used to work there!

Meanwhile Gardens was a haven of tranquility after the stresses of starting a new job and I soon found myself armpit deep in waders and waist deep in a pond, happy as Larry with a net and the sun warming my back. What a perfect antidote to city living, I thought.

I'm accustomed to strange gardening tasks, and I love getting my hands dirty but it seems funny that I have ended up in charge of a project myself, considering I used to have a reputation for being a hopeless daydreamer who couldn't organise anything much if her life depended on it! It's wonderful what can be achieved with a little enthusiasm, though.

The great thing about Transitions is that many are still in their infancy and there is so much opportunity to lead projects if you feel up to it. For me, it all started in one of our first meetings when we listed - or mapped - possible sites for growing food in our area (there's quite a lot of mapping and visioning, which is basically a way of putting ideas down on paper - and maps - with the aid of felt tip pens, and seeing where they could go).

It's a really exciting time, when there are boundless possibilities to what we can achieve. We're like vegetable crusaders on a mission to create a haven of growth and community; all bright-eyed and bushy tailed we came up with a number of possible growing spaces and then volunteered for whatever we thought we could achieve.

So I put my hand up for the gardens, fenced off in one corner of the park. None of us had any idea what they were used for or by whom, but I wandered in one afternoon and got chatting with some staff, who were incredibly enthusiastic about our ideas. I was really expecting a flat 'no' from them but about a month later we met again to discuss our ideas.

We toured around the space and decided on the best way to provide free courses for people in the area. I agreed to use my community contacts to find out whether we can find enough people to attend them.

I'm emailing and talking to people to try and fuel some interest, and there's been a really warm response from people in the community. It feels like baby steps but it does feel like progress - like a gift to the community, and a gift to myself: I can now say on my CV I have project managed, which looks great!

In the meantime, there's nothing like getting out there and just standing in a pond fishing for duckweed, giggling with a bunch of other people and enjoying nature, nettle stings and all, and I really hope I can be just as hands on when my own project comes to fruition.

Posted by Laura ( 6:38 PM )
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Wednesday Jul 15, 2009

Dig for victory?

Last night my transition town did our first Guerrilla Gardening. Under cover of night... OK it was still light, and we weren't being that covert.

Despite spending my tired monday night on the end of a spade, I couldn't recommend the activity highly enough. In fact our growing group has made some really exciting progress in the last few weeks.

Thanks to the enthusiasm of our co-ordinator we have made tons of links with our community in a matter of months, and thanks to her we found ourselves standing on an unloved pile of earth beside the A10 for two hours last night.

As I stood atop the brick-built council planter, digging away in the fading light, I saw London rushing past in buses, in cars and on foot, and I thought: this is my street, my city and I am making my mark. 

At the end of my old road is a medium-sized estate. The unloved planter stands on the corner, looking out onto London's longest road. The space was a lot bigger than we anticipated. Big enough to hold two trees, now only one remains, and the rest was a rather uncharming mass of brambles, with copious amounts of litter. Oh, and about a gozillion snails.

By the time I got there three of them (not the snails) were well underway in the bramble clearance. A broken bench facing our patch was being repaired (ever-resourceful Jo had bought some timber at the weekend to slot into the concrete legs). I dug up a rosemary plant from my garden for the project and it smelled wonderful while we worked. Passers-by showed varying amounts of interest, and one man, an Egyptian farmer who knew Jo from their children's school, helped us dig. A friend of his walking past joined in too.

I fought the bramble roots with a spade for about an hour, pulling out cans and food wrappers, and there was so much gusto flying about, the middle prong of one of the forks snapped. The impromtu helpers dug and wrestled out some old bricks buried in the soil just where we wanted the mulberry tree.

All finished and contented at about 9.30 we tested out the bench, while admiring our work and sipping some Turkish wine. Eventually we took the snails, the recycling and two or three wheelbarrows of compostible foliage with us to release and recycle.

Everything we planted was edible, and we promised to water something every time we pass by, which is every day for most of us. I can't wait until the rosemary's, big and the smell, like roast lamb, wafts out reminding the city where the food we eat comes from serving as a testament that even in London nature is closer than we think, and more than just a convenient place to throw litter.

 

Posted by Laura ( 4:56 PM )
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Wednesday Jul 08, 2009

Transition towns

It’s about a year since I first heard about Transition Towns when, in a baptism of fire I went along to their annual conference in place of a friend who couldn’t make it. I didn’t really know what to expect from the weekend butwas approaching the finals for my degree and desperately needed a break to refresh myself.

I’ve always been passionate about the environment but that week I felt I entered a whole new world. There was a tangible optimism and an infectious energy about what these people were doing. Visioning exercises followed workshops before we ended the three days doing what can only be described as a giant hokey-cokey!

I met people who had come from as far away as Japan to talk about sustainability, and soon learnt more about the concept of Peak Oil and how it would affect our lives. Peak Oil describes the point when oil reserves become depleted and prices ‘peak’, a process which has already started. In the next decade it is predicted it will become too expensive to maintain our current way of life and when you think about how much we rely on this black gold, it is a frightening prospect.

However, rather than standing on a soapbox and waving a self-righteous finger at the world, founder Rob Hopkins came up with a workable and rather attractive solution. As our food supplies are so vulnerable to oil prices he realised that by relying on our own communities and producing food locally we can tackle this.  

Coming back to London I just couldn’t see how the idea of local self-sufficiency could work in a city, however, with so many people crammed into a small space, and hardly any free land. After some discussion with members of my Friends of the Earth group, who felt the same, the idea went to the back of my mind.

A year later I was elated to find that someone in my area felt brave enough to address these issues and start their own group, to take a part of North London on the transition away from oil dependence. And they were based just 10 minutes from my house! I sent them an email and less than a week later found myself with three other women in the co-ordinator’s front room discussing growing vegetables on railway platforms.

Transition Towns can address anything from reducing waste to creating a local currency to keep transportation down, but my group focuses on growing food. This suits me perfectly as I love nature and gardening. We’ve had two meetings so far with another coming up, but we’ve managed an event in the local school and one in the park, as well as making lots of connections with our community. I’ve met some great people I may never have spoken to otherwise.

I’ve taken on two projects of my own, both in their early stages, and one entirely my idea, and this week I’m arranging meetings with a horticultural centre to try and set up training for people to grow their own food. So many people love the idea of community and we have had so much support so far. I really feel I’m part of something special where I can make a difference.

Posted by Laura ( 3:46 PM )
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Ecological learnings

So, an introduction...I'm Laura. I'm a recently qualified – and largely unemployed - journalist. I'm originally from Somerset and finished my degree in Nutrition last year at Westminster University in Central London. As I'm a sucker for punishment I went straight into a very intensive NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists) qualification in January, where I had 'writing tight' drilled into me. I am now fully able not to waste a single word (!) I stayed in London for the jobs and now write for a handful of websites, mostly on the environment.

My ecological leanings started in childhood, when a friend and I were nicknamed 'Greenpeace' for trying to save the pond newts from becoming crude science experiments for the more gruesome boys in our class. We were tiny defenders of the environment then, and I like to think I'm carrying on that tradition now. I've been involved with various environmental organisations and activities in the last few years but things moved up a gear after I discovered Transition Towns about a year ago.

Since then I've found myself more involved with trying to make a change to my environment than I ever was before. Because Transition Towns work at a community level they get you in touch with the people around you, which really appealed to me. In the past I've stood on the street trying to get people to sign bits of paper about airport expansion, but it always felt like I could come and go from these activities and more often than not I'd drift away from them when something else came up. Because our Transition is so small (there are about 15 of us running the projects in our area) I feel the weight of responsibility on my shoulders, and that's really motivating: I don't want to let my group down.

 

Posted by Laura ( 3:44 PM )
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