Per-marine-culture

With a startling report just released by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, one wonders whether it’s time to include the world’s seas in our understanding of permaculture.

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France and Fruitfulness

I sometimes feel that a garden is rather like a young child. If you are with them constantly, their growth is almost imperceptible. But if there is a hiatus in your relationship with them, then the change can seem rapid and radical.

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Is Organic Over?

A really interesting discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme today, engaged with what appears to be a perennial question these days, is the organic bubble about to burst? As presenter Sheila Dillon writes on her blog, ‘On paper it doesn’t look good: sales of organic food in supermarkets down by almost 6% in 2010, the average cost of a trolley of food up 4.7 per cent from March to April and a £780 drop in disposable incomes this year and next, and so it goes on… Evidence that recent positive changes to our food habits are being reversed.’ But is that the whole story?

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Back to an Organic Future

I read a fascinating article last week by a Mumbai-based journalist, Nishika Patel, who told about India’s struggling farmers, ‘starting to profit from a budding interest in organic living.’ It was, however, made all the more stimulating when read alongside a further two articles which were flagged by the Soil Association  and published in a special supplement in the Times newspaper by Raconteur Media.

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The Homemade festival

Celebrations of harvest have been a mainstay of community life right through human history. They are occasions for communities to gather and celebrate their life, give thanks for the abundance of creation, and imagine the future. In our own day, we have recently seen an enormous upsurge in interest in growing produce. Is this the time to re-imagine Harvest? Here are plans for a Homemade Festival that you might like to try.

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Allotment Fuss Over Nothing?

Government plan to free local authorities from 103-year-old obligation to provide plots of public land for cultivation by gardeners, which could see cash-strapped local authorities selling off allotment land. Or at least that’s what some believe is going to happen.

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An Easter

Thursday
We were enjoying a supper with friends downstairs at The Runcible Spoon in Stokes Croft. The meal marked the first plantings of our community supported agriculture project on some land next to the M32. At about 9.30pm we became aware of activity outside, blue flashing lights, dogs, orders…The police had arrived, and not just a few. Wagon after wagon of these black clothed soldiers paraded in as darkness descended. A helicopter circled overhead. The night was warm and the people were restless.

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The Walled Garden begins to take shape

There seems to something special about ‘primary production’ or what Tolstoy would call ‘bread labour’. To get involved in growing food, working land, spinning thread, building shelters is somehow also to get in touch with ourselves at a deep level, and provides an opportunity to forge friendships that cross all sorts of cultural and social boundaries. A new project in Bristol has just opened, in the middle of a tower block estate, turning what was once the substantial walled garden of a vicarage into a neighbourhood growing project.

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Grow Zones - now is the time

This is the moment when the sap begins to rise and when thoughts move to the garden. Grow Zones is about to be advertised nationally and our aim is to get more than fifty teams across the UK enjoying working with each other as they grow more of their own food. Would you like to form a team? Can you pass on the news about Grow Zones to your own networks?

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An invitation to reflect on your Way of Life

In the first eighteen months there has been some confusion about how you join EarthAbbey. Some have signed up on the web. Others have subscribed financially, and we recognise there has been a lack of clarity. After consultation, we have decided that the heart of membership of EarthAbbey will be a commitment to reflect on our Way of Life.

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