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I can’t wait to see this film, it looks like a real eye-opener:
I’ve spent a lovely day at the Tatton Flower Show with N’s mom. Tatton is quite near to us, so N’s mom headed over to ours early this morning, then we set off in convoy. The weather switched between warm sunny spells and sudden downpours – there is a constant eb-and-flow of people rushing into the pavilions as the rain buckets down, then back out into the show ground when the sun reappears.
There were some lovely garden designs this year (my favourites are always the back-to-back gardens as they are small ordinary-sized gardens), although I think there were more I loved last at last year’s show. One of my favourite garden’s this year was ‘Be Fruitful’ and is the only one I took photographs of.
I’m not a huge fruit lover (although raspberries and alpine strawberries go down a treat), but this garden was delightful. It was an urban fruit orchard, with small espalier apple trees and strawberries in window boxes, interplanted with soft grasses and chocolate brown scabious.
We discovered these beautiful little tomatoes called red currant. They produce slender bunches of tiny red tomatoes, much smaller than cherry tomatoes. We picked up a seed catalogue from the exhibitor and will hopefully buy some seeds next spring to try growing them.
This exhibitor also had some other fabulous vegetables. Including these other fabulous varieties of tomatoes…
And take a look at those onions!
And here’s something to keep me dreaming – I didn’t ask the price…
I bought some lovely things including a couple of grasses (including a bunny tails grass! very cute), a pretty new lantern, a cosy waterbottle, a outside light for the front of our house, and some fantastic sounding anti-slug pullets made from wool. If I get time towards the end of the week I would love to share with you this great product – I put some down straight away when I got home, so we shall see if it helps my slug and snail problem.
If anyone else has been to Tatton today, or is going over the next couple of days, I hope you have a great time!
Tuesday night was the event that I’ve been working towards for the past year. The culmination of a year’s volunteering for my local branch of CPRE(Campaign to Protect Rural England), single-handedly running their local food work. We have been running ‘Buy Local’ Food Awards to celebrate the fantastic work of businesses in Cheshire that grow/sell us great local food.
The event was a combined effort from myself and Helen Meade, who is the Regional Co-ordinator for the CPRE ‘Mapping Local Food Webs’project which is being rolled out across England. Helen has been running a pilot project in Knutsford, and with my local food awards coming to an end, it was a perfect opportunity to join forces and put on a lovely event.
We have been busy advertising the event through our different networks, but we still didn’t know how many people would turn up – I think we were hopefully for 30 (my secret goal was 50 though). We had a number of interested businesses who offered to bring along samples of their food, and all five of our award winners were able to come.
So Tuesday evening finally rolled around. My car was filled with tablecloths, earthenware vases, chalkboards and hedgerow flowers (a mixture of elderflowers, daisies, grasses, and cow parsley). We had about an hour and a half to set the room up, with the normal hiccups (no glasses or cutlery…aah!).
Businesses started arriving and setting up their displays of food, leaflets and samples of food – yumm! We had Riverford Organic:
One of our ‘Buy Local’ Food Award winners – Riverside Organic – brought some baskets of the seasonal produce grown on their farm. We also had sausage rolls from another of our winners H Clewlow Butchers, homemade gooseberry fool (I really want this recipe!) from the Walton Lea Project also an award winner, homemade cakes from Abbey Leys Farm, and chutneys and jams from a lovely company that I don’t know the name of!
Over 50 people turned out for the event, which is more than we ever imagined, so are so pleased and hope that people enjoyed the evening. It was so lovely to see my local food awards come a glorious end with the winners accepting their awards. I have really enjoyed running the awards but it has been exhausting at times, so I’m looking forward to a month off from volunteering before I start planning my next project.
There should be some professional photographs available soon as a journalist from the local paper came along to the event. If and when they are available I will post them or a link to them.
Tonight we are off out to visit friends for dinner – they are having a Mexican party and I can’t wait to find out what delicious food we’ll be eating.
But before that, I’m heading out to our May Queen Festival to help out on a stall to promote my ‘really local food map’ for our village. I’ve got a large map of the village and surrounding area and am armed with some sticky tabs – hopefully people will write down places they know that sell local food and pop them on the map. At least it’s sunny for the parade, so I’m sure there will be a good turn out of people.
I will leave you with a photo of the first homegrown carrot of the year – it’s a round and stumpy Paris Market Baron and so so sweet. Yum! Have a lovely day!
I do quite a bit of volunteering in any free time that I have. Most of it is to do with local food. On Tuesday 16th June I am helping to run an event in Knutsford, Cheshire to celebrate the local food grown and produced in our county. If anyone reading this happens to live near to Knutsford and is interested in local food, we would be delighted if you are able to join us.
There will be a project update on the Mapping Local Food Websproject that has been taking place in Knutsford, which is funded by Making Local Food Work and CPRE. The ‘Buy Local’ food awards that I have run for CPRE Cheshire over the past year will see the presentation of the awards to the winners – I will add another post in the next day or so to let you know who are winners are. There will also be local produce to try, and some delicious cakes, tea and coffee.
We’d love to see you there! For more information contact Helen Meade on 07833 250 134 or leave me a comment.
This week has been a bit mad and I just haven’t had a chance to sit down and tell you about our lovely visit to the Potato Day at Hulme Community Garden Centre last weekend. I am finally getting that chance.
Hulme Community Garden Centre is what it’s name says – a community run garden centre. It is based in Manchester and is a little oasis in what is an area of concrete and tarmac. I have long been on their mailing list and receive regular updates about the lovely events and things that they are doing. But I hadn’t ever been in.
Last weekend they held a Potato Day. Having just taken on an allotment I have plenty of space for those large vegetable plants (like potatoes), so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to visit the garden centre and stock up on potatoes and onion sets.
It was everything I was hoping it would be, and although looking like most gardens rather dreary at this time of year, you could see that it is a well loved green space. There were community gardens, a green roof, ‘pot rescue’, and a small shop selling local handicrafts and artwork.
one of the community gardens
the pots of 'pot rescue'
The potatoes of ‘Potato Day’ were laid out in a large polytunnel. A huge long table was laden down with hessian sacks and there was a fantastic display celebrating the many different varieties. We came away with a bag of salad and maincrop potatoes, some onion and shallot sets and a small bag of garlic. There was a good selection of fruit bushes and other lovely plants that I was tempted by, but with N there I was quite restrained.
There were baked potatoes (how appropriate) and chunky soup for lunch and berry cupcakes for hungry children. I am planning on going back during the summer to see the community gardens in bloom and perhaps without N so I can be a little less restrained…
For more information on Hulme Community Garden Centre please visit their website: http://www.hulmegardencentre.org.uk.
Abbey Leys Farmers Market :: Cheshire ::
I am still defrosting after spending the morning in a draughty barn at the local farmers market. I am a volunteer with the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) and am the sole volunteer responsible for their local food work. I had a stall at a number of farmers markets in Cheshire over the summer, handing out leaflets and gathering nominations for a ‘Buy Local’ food awards we have been running.
This time I was helping with a project that is being piloted round the country called Mapping Local Food Webs. It sounds confusing and it is quite – but in brief it’s researching and documenting the relationships between farmer/producer, retailer and customer, and if there are any challenges. If you’re interested more information can be found at http://www.makinglocalfoodwork.co.uk/.
The pilot project in the North West is being centred around Knutsford (if you’re reading this and from Knutsford (!) and are interested in getting involved please leave me a comment). We had a great map of Knutsford and the surrounding area of about a 15 miles radius. We asked people to put a coloured sticky dot on the map to show us where they had come from. It was really interesting to see where people had travelled from – from the really local who had walked down the road, to those who had travelled over 15 miles and had to stick their coloured dot on the edge of the map.
For me, I consider ‘local food’ to be food that is grown/produced within about 10 miles of where I live. Nationally I believe it is defined as food that is produced within 30 miles of you, which is actually quite a distance if you look at it on a map. It was a pretty quiet market today, the first of the year, but we are aiming to go back in a month when it should be back to its busy self, and hopefully the map will come with us and we should start to build up a really interesting picture of where people travel from to visit the market.
On this rainy, bitterly cold day I thought I would like to write about some of the vegetable gardens that I have seen on my travels. I have decided to start in France, more specifically in the Loire Valley region, which is where I have stayed on my last two visits. We camp at a delightful, intimate campsite run by an expat-English family – we can highly recommend it to anyone who’s looking for a rustic, relaxing break. The campsite is called Le Chant D’Oiseau and more info can be found at http://www.loire-gites.com/.
Anyways, back to vegetable gardens. Our visit at the end of the summer was full of diverting down side streets and peering over walls to see what other people were growing in their gardens. The hot summer weather in the Loire allows for tomatoes such as these to thrive, which makes me incredibly jealous as I think back to my poor attempts.
big round juicy tomatoes :: Loire Valley, France ::
This small vegetable garden in a small hillside town on the banks of Loire river shows that the smallest of spaces can be productive – look at those squash plants! I was very curious about the number of plants and herbs that were dug into the ground in pots…any suggestions as to why?
small town garden :: Loire Valley, France ::
We passed the pumpkin below on a scenic (or perhaps slightly lost) route we took through some vineyards, and N was instructed to pull over while I ran back to get a photo. Consequently, we discovered a beautiful old property opposite the pumpkin patch that we fell in love with and momentarily lost our heads in gidding thoughts of selling up and moving to rural France. I shall never forget that house with its warm sunbathed courtyard.
orange pumpkin :: lost in the Loire Valley, France ::
On Wednesday night I went to a film showing of ‘The Power of Community’ – a film about how Cuba survived peak oil. The whole film was a real eye-opener, but the piece of community gardens and urban agriculture was particularly interesting. Wherever pieces of land in urban areas were rundown or falling down, on every small derelict corner of the city, people cleared the ground and turned them into fantastic pockets of green – bursting with edible plant.
It was quite scary to think that perhaps we will only realise this change in attitude and habits in a crisis, but the positive outcomes in Cuba can provide us all with hope. If you can watch this film, do, it’s really good, but you can also find some great clips on YouTube – if you also search for ‘urban food growing in havana’ there’s a great clip about it from Mony Don’s ‘Around the Worl in 80 Gardens’ as is ‘Seeds in the City.’
I love food and especially food that comes from distinct places – food that is specific to a place and shaped by the landscape. I hope that Eat the Earth will be an outlet to share the fantastic food that is local to me, and local to other places that I visit. I will also share the food and recipes I like to cook, especially with homegrown goodies.
courgette flowers at the Saumur market :: the Loire Valley, France ::
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