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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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