Emma Pritchard talks to three women who have
cultivated food and friendships
Pam Warhurst, 61, is a board member of an
environmental advisor body. She is divorced, has one daughter and lives in
North Yorkshire.
When I need salad or potatoes I just walk
along my high street and pick some from a bed at the side of the pavement. And
if I fancy fruit, I get some strawberries from the fruit bushes by the health
centre. We started Incredible Edible, a project that has created vegetable
patches throughout the town of Todmorden, three years ago, and it has
transformed our lives.
“We transformed our town – with a
vegetable patch in the high street”
I’ve always been interested in how food and
the environment influence community. During the war, people worked together to
grow enough to eat, but over the years we’ve become distanced from where our
food comes from and, as a result, have increasingly less contact with our
neighbours. I came up with the idea for Incredible Edible when I was at a
sustainability conference for work and I realised we had so much disused land
in Todmorden that could be put to better use as shared veg patches.
I asked a friend of mine, Mary, to help,
and together we organised a meeting at the pub to see if anyone else wanted to
get involved. It was a stab in the dark and I couldn’t believe it when 60
people turned up. We set about creating a plan of what to plant where, and
started small – salad leavers along the high street then herbs in flower beds at
the railway station. We all had leftover seeds at home so it didn’t cost much.
After that, we approached the police station to see if we could use their beds
to grown corn, the fire station offered to plant apple trees out front, and we
asked the health centre and surgery if we could put in fruit bushes. We now
have 70 beds throughout the town, growing everything else from beans to
squashes. We also have a council-funded orchard.
“Pam and the team now have 70 vegetable
beds throughout the town”
There’s a core team of ten people
coordinating Incredible Edible, but everyone in the town gets involved. If
someone is walking home and sees a patch that needs to be weeded, they just do
it. Or if you have excess seeds at home, you might just pop them in a public
bed. At first, we made the mistake of replacing all the flowers with vegetables
but the town started to look a bit grim so now we go for fabulous and
functional, and grow the two side by side.
The produce is available for everyone to
help themselves to, and so far no one has been greedy. In fact, for the first
12 months, barely anyone picked what was growing – they were too scared to
touch! We now have signs labeling the plants and giving advice on when to pick
them and how to cook them, and I’ll often see families getting off the train
and picking vegetables to enjoy when they get home, which always gives me a
buzz.
We organise an annual harvest festival at
the church where we gather all the produce from our patches and serve homemade
soups and salads. In addition, we received a grant from the local education
authority to run courses in growing your own and basic cookery, and the bakery
run free bread-making classes. We’ve set up a farmers’ market and we’re working
on a local apprenticeship scheme.
The project now runs in 20 other towns
throughout the country, and we’ve also had communities get in touch from Japan
and New Zealand because they want to introduce a similar initiative. What
started off as a bit of fun has transformed the way we live our lives. Local
food gives people local pride. Why not see what it can do for your community?
