Incredible! Plant Veg, Grow a Revolution , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Pam Warhurst

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173 pages

English

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Incredible! reveals how one town decided to take control of its own future - with vegetables. The future looks bleak. The economy's in the doldrums. We've lost faith in politicians and big business. Over all that looms the threat of climate change - extreme weather is already sending shock waves through global food supplies. But a once-forgotten Yorkshire mill town is spreading a new story of hope... This is the tale of an extraordinary local food movement that has become a worldwide phenomenon. Told by Pam Warhurst, co-founder of Incredible Edible Todmorden, and writer Joanna Dobson, the book invites readers into a humorous, inspiring and often moving series of stories that brought people together through the simple method of planting vegetables in public places. People have found that when they put edible plants in their front gardens, they get to know their neighbours, building a community one conversation at a time. When they grow fruit trees at school, children learn life skills. And when market traders stock local produce, they build business networks. Incredible Edible Todmorden has sparked similar projects across the world - and it could be your story, too! Incredible! Plant Veg, Grow a Revolution has an international audience, appealing to anyone who cares about the environment, gardening, community, education or local enterprise.

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 août 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783066209
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	5 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Copyright 2014 Pam Warhurst and Joanna Dobson
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
AN URBAN POLLINATORS PROJECT
www.urbanpollinators.co.uk
Matador
9 Priory Business Park
Kibworth Beauchamp
Leicestershire LE8 0RX, UK
Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299
Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277
Email: books@troubador.co.uk
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
ISBN 978 1783066 209
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
To all the people who made Incredible Edible Todmorden happen www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk
C ONTENTS
Captions and credits
Introduction
Part One: The Story of Incredible Edible Todmorden
One: Call to Action
Two: The Power of Food
Three: One Stick of Rhubarb at a Time
Four: Bending the System
Five: Living on the Wobbly Side of Life
Six: If You Eat, You re In
Seven: The Lost Arts
Eight: School Dinners
Nine: Eat, Think, Learn
Ten: The Prince and I
Eleven: Against the Odds
Twelve: The Spinning Plate Show
Thirteen: Growing Up
Fourteen: Richness Rediscovered
Fifteen: Incredible Spreadable
Sixteen: A Forever Project
Part Two: Over to You
Introduction
Getting Started
Taking it Further
Volunteers: how to get them and keep them
What to Grow
Raised Beds for Numpties
Money Talk
Working with Schools
Working with Businesses
Working with Local Authorities and Other Official Bodies
Model Constitution
Acknowledgements
Crowdfunding Thanks
References
Notes
Captions and credits
Illustrations
Unless otherwise stated, all pictures, colour and black and white, are by the Incredible Edible Todmorden team
Chapter 1
Towpath signs made by Incredible Edible Todmorden volunteer Linda Reith.
Chapter 2
Mary Clear (left) and Pam Warhurst in Mary s sharing garden.
Chapter 3
Cooking up a storm: Abdul Moshaid, chef at the Vedas restaurant in Todmorden, at our first harvest festival.
Chapter 4
Pick your five-a-day on your way in to see the doctor! Picture by Nick Green
Chapter 5
Fruit and veg in a planter at Fielden Wharf, Todmorden: people on the canal boats help us with the watering.
Chapter 6
Tony Mulgrew, former head of catering at Todmorden High School, demonstrating how to make soup in his Pulp Kitchen.
Chapter 7
Estelle Brown with kale by the canal in Todmorden. Picture by Arthur Edwards
Chapter 8
From pre-school to secondary, all the schools in Todmorden are involved in growing.
Chapter 9
We like to start them young in Todmorden. Kaia s been involved in growing since her dad started volunteering at Incredible Farm when she was a baby. Picture by Michael Smith
Chapter 10
According to Mary, HRH Prince Charles promised her that when he is king she can grow vegetables anywhere she likes. Picture by Arthur Edwards
Chapter 11
Nick Green at Incredible Farm.
Chapter 12
There s nothing like some healthy chard to put a smile on your face.
Chapter 13
All we are saying is: Give bees a chance. Children join the campaign to win money for our edible walking route.
Chapter 14
Todmorden cheesemaker Carl Warburton gave the local paper an irresistible headline when he scooped a silver medal at the British Cheese Awards.
Chapter 15
Fran ois Rouillay, founder of Incredible Edible France, with a young helper outside his home in Colroy-la-Roche. Picture by Incredible Edible France
Chapter 16
The power of small actions: one more home for one more bee.
Introduction
Imagine helping yourself to a juicy cob of sweetcorn from the yard outside a police station. You might feel secretly pleased that nobody has come out to arrest you. You might be surprised to see the corn there in the first place. You d get even more of a shock if you knew a police officer was watching you on CCTV with a huge grin on her face.
What seems surprising in most places is normal in the west Yorkshire town of Todmorden. Come here any day in the growing season and you will see fruit and vegetables in some most unusual places. There are tomatoes along the canal towpath, strawberries outside the college and herbs on the station platform. What s more, you are welcome to take as much of it as you like. You can pick your five a day from the fruit trees in front of the health centre or help yourself to a cauliflower from the raised beds at the old people s home. You can snip a salad by the fire station or cut broccoli at the bus stop.
We call it propaganda planting. This simple but radical act of growing food in public places for everyone to share has been a starting point for transforming every area of our town s life. Once a bustling centre for textile production, Todmorden suffered badly from the slump in manufacturing that set in after the Second World War and gathered pace in the 1970s and beyond. It became stuck in a downward spiral, just another small town blighted by economic decline. Shops and pubs were closing, the market was struggling to compete with supermarkets, house prices were falling and many people had to commute to find work.
Now people come from all over the world to witness the revolution that we call Incredible Edible Todmorden. We have had academics from Sweden, education experts from Japan and tourists from as far away as Venezuela and New Zealand. All our primary schools have their own fruit trees and vegetable beds. The high school has a polytunnel overflowing with organic produce for school dinners and is the first in the country to host a food hub producing fish and vegetables for sale to the local community. The doctors surgery has an apothecary garden stuffed with herbs. Ordinary people are opening their homes to offer lessons in cookery, and friendships are being formed across the generations as our older residents help their younger neighbours rediscover lost arts like pickling and jam making.
Up on the hills that surround our town, the farmers are discovering that all this growing is good for business. As local people get more interested in where their food comes from, producers have been inspired to bring out new lines, like an award winning cheese, and sausages from rare breed pigs. Market traders and restaurant owners also say they re profiting from the Incredible Edible effect.
On one level, what s happening in Todmorden is simple. It s about growing food and eating it. But that is not the whole story. This isn t some idealistic dream of self sufficiency, a kind of town-wide version of the 1970s television sitcom The Good Life . It is, rather, one town s response to the increasingly urgent question of how we ensure a secure future for our children and grandchildren.
Back in 2007 a few of us were becoming more and more concerned not just about the problems facing Todmorden but also about huge global issues like economic decline, rising fuel costs and erratic weather patterns. We were worried about the kind of world our children and grandchildren would inherit. We recognised we urgently needed to find a way of life that would not only help our town to meet these challenges but would also enable us to be kinder to the planet. At the same time we knew that concepts like peak oil and climate change can be hard for an individual to engage with: they seem so complex and overwhelming that it is tempting just to ignore them.
So we started to ask whether we could find a unifying language that would cut across age, income and culture and bring people together to find a new way of living. A language that would enable us to see land differently, to think about our resources in new ways and to interact with one another more frequently, more constructively and with more kindness.
It turns out that there is such a language and that language is food. Food is the catalyst that has enabled us in Todmorden to experiment with new ways of doing things. In a world where ordinary people feel increasingly alienated from the forces that shape their lives, whether that s governments, banks, oil companies or agribusiness, our focus on food has given us a straightforward way of taking back control. It has provided a vision for the future that doesn t depend on government grants or decisions by committees, but rather on people rolling up their sleeves and getting stuck in. It s a vision that starts with what people have, not what they haven t - and where politicians and experts learn from the people instead of lecturing to them.
It s also a vision that has given us a lot of fun.
This book tells the story of Incredible Edible Todmorden from its earliest days to the present. It shows how we are dealing with issues that affect us all, such as where our food comes from and how we can all have enough in a changing world. It explains how we are meeting challenges like how to ensure our town is a place where people feel good and everyone has a fair chance in life, and how to create opportunities for learning new skills and applying those skills in the real world of work and business.
Incredible Edible is not the only way of dealing with these challenges, but the hundreds of vegetable tourists who come to our town every year and the thousands of visitors we get to our website every month prove that it is a way that resonates with a great many people. We hope this book will inspire even more people to trust in the power of small actions and to discover as we have that it is