Hedvig’s permaculture diploma

I have been helping to run a series of workshops at Stepping Stones City Farm, in Stepney.  The farm is undergoing all sorts of changes, and one of the things that they wanted to set up was a growing club.  I was asked to come in to help run them.  We had a great action day moving the polytunnel and getting lots of volunteers on broad, and planting some broad beans.

The first session we taught people how to make a sowing mix, plant broad beans.  Everyone really got into it.  Great to have scrummages for coir and naming of beans.  Loved the enthusiasm.  The next session was about propagating and crop rotation.  So the last session, which was on Saturday, we planted up a rotation demonstration raised bed and did some sheet mulching.

I might be doing more workshops down there working with different community groups, which would be really exciting.  Who knows what else will happen….

Oh yes, we have been planting trees.  Lots of them.  31 in all.  Mainly apples, but also pear, plum and mulberry.  None of them are the same variety.  So we aimed for a huge range of flavours and to extend the season as much as possible.  They are all on Somerford Grove, a council estate in Hackney that I have been working on.  It has been wonderful to work with everyone.  So many people felt really inspired and empowered by planting the trees.  It will be amazing to see the leaves and then the blossom come out this year.  And may there be many an apple bobbing session.

Last month, I was to participate in a fundraiser for ‘Million Women Rise‘, a campaign to end male violence against women.  I have been interested and involved with gender stuff for years, and it was great to be able to participate in the event.

The subject matter is quite heavy, so I decided I wanted to go with a positive, empowering little demo that people could do.  What better than making pots to sow seeds in, made out of old newspapers.  The fundraiser took place in a pub up in Newington Green, and it was great to look around and see lots of people making little pots, and after a quick session feeling like they had mastered this and could do it themselves.  One of the barriers to growing removed.  Also enjoyed hanging out with some kids beforehand and making masks, alien antenna and those sorts of fun and games.

My parents live in a very rural part of Northumberland (type Falstone in Google maps to check).  They bought the place a few years ago, and are slowly renovating the house, coach house and gardens.  As they have left the midgie-infested north for balmy southern Sweden I was left with the task of going up there to pick berries.  It’s a tough life.  I lived alone in the house for a year or so and spent a lot of time out in the veg garden, re-designing, pruning and generally caring for the place.  It is such a delight going back and seeing how things are going.

Falstone really is the perfect antidote to London. The vista are huge and all-embracing, the wildlife is abundant.  When I first arrived home I noticed something in the drive, it was the hedgehog scurry to safey.  There are deer that wander around the garden and fields, plenty of birds, the friendly cat from next door.  And the garden is beautiful and wild.

Picking berries sounds like it should be a relatively straight forward task.  You go to the berries, pick up, weigh them, pack them and freeze.  Easy.  Except in Falstone the first ‘go to the berries’ involves a real hunt for the red berries.  There are wild strawberries all over the garden: all around the pond, under the rose bushes, in the path, in walls, in holding beds.  The red currant I almost missed altogether as they were in pots close to the wall of the veg garden.  The raspberries are also all round the pond, there are massive cans where the lupins used to be rampant, and then all along the edge of the orchard.  The blackcurrants were much more obvious and I picked a lot.  The first few days things hadn’t quite ripened so I decided to change the thing I was picking… I went for leaves and herbs instead.

The garden was so abundant, it was just a delight to have the task of harvesting, and I hardly made a dent in it.  I picked a lot of peppermint, and had quite a few nasal enhancing peppermint teas there.  The oils in the peppermint are so strong you really do inhale the stuff, and it feels like your whole nose is opening up in relief.

A few days later, I reluctantly left our paradise to head back to Hackney. But my work was done: the pantry looked well stocked with hearty bundles of lemon balm, feverfew, lavender and peppermint; I have a good amount of lady’s mantle, elderflower, yarrow that are drying ready for winter infusions; and packed peppermint and wild strawberry cuttings for my brother’s garden.    But I still managed to get a good amount of berries.

It’s been two weeks now since the broad beans have arrived in our veg box, and two weeks I’ve been dreaming about some sort of broad bean paste… that sounds very unimaginative, but unfortunately my two weeks have been very broad-bean-less.  I had a few quickly boiled and rolled in butter.  But not the recipe that I have been longing for.  Not the sumptuous seduction of fine olive oil, combined with the tongue curling tartness of lemons.  So as the days pass, more ingredients get added to my paste… maybe broad bean and courgette paste… and more dishes… beetroot tahini paste, or grilled halloumi and courgettes.

This weekend has been a real weekend.  Two days off.  In a row.  Such a rarity for me these days.  No plans, no demands and very few people around.  Of course it soon got littered with unexpected calls from wannabe flatmates.   Saturday spend the morning waking up listening to bits of podcast and falling asleep again.  Managed to pull myself out of bed for water melon and one of the aforementioned flatmates and meandered to the market.  We did the usual ambulation, this time introducing it and our favourite stalls to two Finns that were staying over.  I got a berry juice and a Portuguese custard tart.

That sustained me to get on my bike and speed along Kingsland Road down to Old Street, Clerkenwell, Holborn, Kingsway and over the bridge to Naveena’s.  She was preparing a Keralan beef stew with handfuls of curry leaves, ginger, and various other spices thrown in.  Once that was on the boil we went up to the roof terrace, armed with a tray full of lunch time goodies.  We slowed sauteed in the sun and lazily munched our way to contentment.

We decided to head out to the Southbank to look for presents and the gift of inspiration, and so I lounged on the sofa while Naveena got ready.  I got stuck into Mai Pham’s New Flavours of the Vietnamese Table.  Finally the inspiration I needed seemed to be captured in a book.  The regional differences, the historical influences.  Our perusal of the bookshop threw up no better books, so I went home with New Flavours in my bag and good intentions.

I came home and went to the Turkish shop and found green olives pregnantly stuffed with garlic cloves.  The clove adds a crunch you can’t expect from an olive, unless you go through to the stone and your teeth are decomposing.  I picked up a bunch of parsley and coriander.  As a veg box buyer and grower, I have a profound sense of appreciation at such abundance, and hate to see the beautifully fragrant leaves disintegrate before my eyes into liquid compost.

But time has come and gone.  Sunday was meant to be a birthday picnic in the park and I imagined my broad bean paste making an appearance there.  It ended up being lounged in bed sorting out newspapers, reading recipe books, listening to podcasts, having long-distance phone calls, watching old movies and I’ve managed to skip more meals than I have eaten this weekend.  And the ones I have longed for still remain just that. There’s always tomorrow.

check this out

and Renny Gleeson.  This one is really short.

Emily Levine at TED

Yes, yes.  I know I haven’t written in ages, and that isn’t very helpful when it comes to managing a blog.  But I have my feeble excuses… like not having much access in the last quarter of 2008.  What was I doing?  I decided that London over the winter wasn’t the best thing, and so chased the growing season and headed south… to Italy.  To the very south of Italy.  I spent most of the summer working on setting up Get Growing and then got some more experience attending the Slow Food ‘Salone de Gusto’ and volunteering on different organic farms.  In early January I took the train back up through Rome and Paris, stopping off with friends, and got back to London.  Can’t believe I’ve been back a month already.  This weekend was the moment of change: seeing my nephews after many months, moving back into my flat, and launching our social enterprise, our first project and the website is now live.  Anway, more detailed posts to follow, but just wanted to get something up here, if anyone is still reading it. 

So, it has been a month since I left FRP, and in that time I’ve moved from Leyton back to Hackney; spent time looking after my nephew; found a new flatmate; reading; pottering about in the garden and submitted a funding application.

It is great to be back in Hackney: living with one of my best friends,  closer to other friends, having impromptu dinners, meandering along the canal and keeping amused by observing the Hackneyites.

Spending time with my nephew has been a lot of fun.  It is great to be instructed by someone that is three that I must go trampolining, read stories of Thomas the tank engine.  I find it amazing being around to realised how quickly he learns, and how the world expands with each new piece of information of which he becomes aware.

The quest for a new flatmate was quite a process, involving drafting a semi amusing ad, fielding all the responses and having various open house days and evenings.  The marathon one Sunday was made tolerable by the continuous supply of crepes.  In the end there was a bit of a battle between three girls, all of whom were interested in similar stuff, and in the end we went for Sarah.  She just moved in this weekend, and so looking forward to seeing what changes that brings.

Having time to read has felt like quite a luxury, not because I didn’t read before, but just because the stuff I am reading requires a fair amount of attention (like how to start up a professional gardening business) and now I’m getting stuck into a book about alternative forms of creative collaborations.  The lighter entertainment came from the new book by Richard Reynolds about Guerrilla Gardening, which was a good read.

The garden is more like a concrete patch, but the window boxes are coming along.  With a good amount of compost harvested we are now growing an array of veg like potatoes, beans, peas, pumpkins, squashes, tomatoes, carrots, salad leaves, edible flowers, herbs  and more.

The funding application was just to cover some of the start up costs for our pilot projects, so will see about that one.  Aside from that we are doing various bits of the project, but June will be the month of more concerted time developing our business plans, segmenting the market, doing some more research and the like.