 Growing food accounts for up to a third of our carbon footprint. Besides insulating the loft, cutting car use and holidaying the ‘slow’ way in our own beautiful countries, it is the easiest way of saving money and carbon. Encouraging community actions like seed and plant swapping, exchanging food surpluses and apple pressing days are positive actions. They raise awareness and encourage communities to grow, buy and eat local fruit and veg.
Most vegetable seeds are F1 hybrids and cannot be harvested and germinated the following season, because they are sterile. They are a generic product, wrapped in manufactured foil and distributed by road all over the country. They can be grown over a climatic region but they do not carry any characteristics that adapt them to local conditions.
I live and garden in the South Downs bio-region. We are on gentle sloping chalk downland that drains quickly and has poor top soil. We need plants that don’t mind a little drought and respond to being mulched and manured for fertility and to preserve water – and also have some slug resistance as well because mulch breeds slugs and snails!
I often visit my friend Ben Law* in the Sussex Weald and marvel at his soil, a deep red loam. I imagine someone from the past travelling east from the chalky downs and seeing the red loam for the first time. The contrast must have been astonishing.
Natural resilience
The seeds we save – often heirloom varieties – are fertile and therefore can be germinated the next year. There are few seed miles involved and no manufactured packaging. More importantly, if saved over seasons, they are selected from plants that are strongest and best adapted to local conditions. We usually choose seeds from the healthiest, most fertile plant that has the best resilience to pests and diseases, prefers our soil type, and is happiest in our local climate. These plants are going to be stronger and more capable of dealing with seasonal extremes. So, when that late frost comes, or that period of unusual drought that encourages pests, or a month of heavy rain that welcomes every slug in the district to our garden, we will be growing not a generic manufactured product but a locally adapted, selected, preferably more resilient crop that can cope better with climate variation.
Rekindling harvest traditions
When my children were at primary school, they were asked to donate to the local church harvest festival every autumn. The food was then circulated to charitable organisations that found needy homes for it.
I found it poignant to see cans piling up and less courgettes and apples. It spoke of a culture that was losing its tradition of home-grown produce. With vegetable seed packets sales now outstripping flower seeds in the UK, I hope that trend will reverse. Even so, countless apples still rot on the ground in gardens and community orchards whilst people flock to supermarkets. We have a long way to go culturally.
The tradition of harvest festivals, of sharing and blessing the harvest, creates a focal point and emphasises the value of local food. As oil prices continue to rise and staples become more and more expensive, food security and the relocalisation of food will be an essential strategy in becoming a more climate change resilient (perma)culture. It is therefore important that we find both in urban and rural areas, and cross-culturally, to create events which value and share the harvest. Apple pressing days and surplus produce and seed saving swaps are not only important for building community links, they are FUN! People love getting together and swapping food and growing tips. We love making fresh apple juice and cider for free and being creative.
These events are a chance to meet new friends and create social ‘glue’. And, for the activist amongst us, this is a ‘soft’ way of encouraging others to think about food issues in a gentle and sociable environment – not in a devastating consciousness-raising way as with the films An Inconvenient Truth or The End of Suburbia.** We need both approaches.
Slow-ing down our culture
Perhaps most important of all, these activities help us identify our food resources locally: Who grows food, where are the neglected fruit trees, orchards, spare land, allotments, and who has surpluses? This helps us to build social networks – community – and could be the first baby steps in creating a community supported agriculture project (see www.futurefarms.org.uk) or a guerilla gardening group. In the future, when oil is at $200/barrel and over, we’ll really need those resources. Then we will have planted orchards, developed community farms and we will have prepared and skilled ourselves for what Richard Heinberg calls ‘powerdown’, a post-oil world. This world will be more climate extreme. We might even have our own community vineyard. We’ll certainly have our own fruit presses.
We have an uncomfortable choice on the near horizon. We can either face the future in a state of unplanned, disconnected chaos with little resilience to the changes that are coming or we can begin the process of building resilience, re-skilling ourselves, slowing down our culture and developing our capacity to co-operate with each other. Personally, I find the latter challenge deeply alluring. It speaks to me of a spiritualising of society and a step forward in human evolution.
Much love, Maddy
Maddy Harland is the editor of Permaculture Magazine – solution for sustainable living. 01730 823311.
*To learn more about Ben Law and his iconic woodland house see www.ben-law.co.uk
**See www.green-shopping.co.uk for more information on the films mentioned above.
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