More of a Party Than A Protest

Tonight we are one year old and we're having a party. We're celebrating our first anniversary and showing the just released In Transition, a short inspirational documentary film about the world-wide Transition movement that began in the UK in 2005.

Transition initiatives are about facing the reality of climate change, peak oil and the economic downturn wherever you live. But they’re also about resilience, being able to share and work together and create a vibrant culture that can thrive amid the challenges of a post-fossil fuel world.

This year Transition Norwich has been meeting up to find out how we can move forward and enjoy this low-carbon future together. It’s been a busy year since we unleashed at St Andrew’s Hall last October. We’ve been appearing all around the city: at the Sustainable Living Fair at the Forum, at St Benedict’s Street Fair, in the Lord Mayor’s Procession (with Celeste, the blue Transition dragon), at the Zero Carbon Fair in Chapelfield Gardens, on a discussion panel after the screening of The Age of Stupid at Cinema City. We’ve had a midsummer party at the Ranger’s House on Mousehold Heath and shared an autumn ceilidh at the Keir Hardie Hall. Our practical projects include starting up a community-supported agriculture scheme at Postwick and a market garden at the Hewett School, a recycling project at Mile Cross and having our own Transition City Allotment at the Bluebell Allotments.

Key behind all these activities are the TN Resilience Action Plan and Transition Circles. The Resilience Plan group (one of 14 theme groups) is developing a detailed vision that sets out how Norwich could meet its needs for food, energy, transport, textiles and other goods over the next twenty years.

Transition Circles were begun by a pioneer group of Transitioners who’ve made a commitment to cut their carbon footprint to half the national average over the next year. Transition Circles are at the hub of Transition – people who are meeting up in neighbourhoods all over the city to discuss what it takes on a personal level to really downshift and create a collaborative economy and still enjoy our lives. You can read about our discoveries in our new blog, This Low-Carbon Life, or even better come to our first birthday party. As well as the film there will be local planet-friendly food and drink and cycle-powered music.

Because climate change and peak oil don’t have to mean the end of the world, just the beginning of a new low-carbon future.

Transition Norwich 1st Anniversary Event, Sunday October 4 at 7.30pm at Unit 5, Beckham Place, Edward Street (off Magdalen Street). Donations. For info and booking contact Chris Hull chrishull@phonecoop.coop or tel 01603 664928

Getting started – our first season on the TN city allotment

October is the start of the new gardening year and we’re getting ready to dig. Today, on our first birthday, Transition Norwich officially opens our very own city allotment at Mahesh Pant’s community allotment scheme (Grow Our Own) on the Bluebell Lane South site. We’re in good company – Michelle Obama’s doing it; lots of fellow Transitioners around the country are doing it; even Her Maj is doing it.

The idea for a TN allotment came to us at Take Five, where the comms group has had quite a few good ideas (must be the ambience!). “Wouldn’t it be great,” we said, “to have our own TN allotment, where we could learn and share, grow lots of exciting things that aren’t easy to get in the shops, cook lots of great dishes with seasonal and regional food – and have a lot of fun doing it?”

The timing was perfect. It was late summer, just in time to join the queue for autumn’s new allotment spaces. I’ve already got a little patch at Mahesh’s Grow Our Own, where several of us Transitioners have been growing veggies for a while. Traditional allotments are huge and the drop-out rate is high (not to mention the waiting lists). At Mahesh’s scheme, he’s divided plots up into a manageable size for beginners, strips just 1.2 metres by 6 metres. Everything is organic. He provides free seeds, plants, compost and muck; there are communal tool-sheds so we don’t have to bring our own.

There’s a lovely other-world atmosphere here. In contrast to the immaculately manicured Dig for Victory allotment in St James’s Park (bulging with productivity) or the serene enclosed space of old walled gardens like Felbrigg in North Norfolk, this is a place full of improvisation and endless variety. At busy times (Wednesday and Sunday mornings) there are lots of people about, ready to chat and swap tips; at other times it’s tranquil and perfect for quiet reflection while keeping on top of the weeds. This is no regimented market garden – there’s room for all sorts of different ways of growing things.

Our site is a block of land 14 metres by 6 metres, with a little pond in the middle. That gives us room for four strips of conventional planting – a strip for potatoes and roots, one for the cabbage family, one for peas and beans and one for everything else that’s grown annually. In the central strip around the pond, we can have fruit, flowers and herbs in pretty little potager beds. And there’s plenty of room for some permaculture – Brenna’s buzzing with ideas for that.

So what’s the next thing for our plot? We need to start digging, because we have only the month of October before it gets too cold to sow things. And we need to start planning in detail, because in no time at all it will be spring again. There are some things that we can still sow and plant now. If we’re speedy with the digging, we can put in onion seeds, garlic cloves (watching out for the foxes – apparently they adore them and dig them up), Russian kale and winter lettuce plants, radicchio and other hardy Italian salads, broad beans….

Waste not, want not

A friend of mine had a bike that his children had grown out of. He didn’t want to throw away a perfectly good bike, and offered to pop it over to us as my girls didn’t have one. We were out for the day (at Bewilderwood – a fabulous place to take the kids!) so he promised to leave the bike tucked safely out of sight in our garden. But he’d never been to our house before, and wanted to make sure he didn’t leave it in some unsuspecting stranger’s garden, so he checked Google Streetview first. He told me his kids were very impressed when they arrived with the bike, and he knew exactly which house was ours – apparently by magic!

I love maps, so I find all these online mapping tools really fascinating, especially the ones with aerial photography overlays. I was browsing around, as you do, when I was struck by a vivid splotch of dark, dark green in the middle of the aerial photo of my parents’ back garden, out in the wilds of Suffolk.

The house isn’t connected to the main sewerage system, so the run off from the house drains into a septic tank. The dark green spotch turned out to be the area right above the septic tank. It’s the part of the garden where the fruit trees bear the most fruit, and where the grass - and the nettles - grow most vigorously. It must be far and away the most fertile spot in the garden. An ideal spot to plant a vegetable garden!

It reminded me of something from The Transition Handbook that stayed with me long after I finished reading it. As a way of bringing Transition’s vision of the future to life, the book contains a number of made-up “news articles from the future”. One of them was about a fictitious future company that collects the, shall we say, liquid waste from public conveniences around Totnes, and transforms it into liquid fertiliser for people’s gardens and community gardens.

And I thought, what a fabulous idea! Turning something that would otherwise be washed away - and wasted - into a useful product that in itself reduces our reliance on oil-based chemical fertilisers. It’s just this kind of creative thinking that I love about the whole Transition Towns concept – looking in new and different way at the things we take for granted. And rather than waiting for someone else to make decisions on our behalf, taking the future – our future – into our own hands.

Local Food - How to make it happen in your community

Local Food - how to make it happen in your community

Tamzin Pinkerton & Rob Hopkins

(Green Books), £12.95. pp.216

“If you want to find a way into Transition, choose food,” Rob Hopkins once said. Hopkins, a teacher of permaculture and co-founder of the Transition movement, sees the re-establishing of local food networks as core to the Transitional shift from our fossil-fuel dependence to a low-carbon way of life. How we engage physically in this process is by learning how to share our lives and work together in a practical and imaginative way.

Community food projects are one of the key entry points into this new co-operation with people, plants and places, and Local Food is an invaluable handbook in how to set them up, the philosophy behind them, and the different areas they cover, including CSAs, community orchards, garden shares, food coops, school gardens and directories. Inside its pages are detailed reports and tips from world-wide initiatives, as well as “mission statements” from community food activists, from Growing Communities in Hackney to the fruit gleaning project, Abundance, in Sheffield. The majority of the examples are from Transition initiatives but there is also a strong band of UK local food projects that work in a similar collaborative spirit. There is an excellent resources section at the back and profiles of some ground-breaking work by individuals (Sandor Ellix Katz’s work on wild fermentation for example is an eye-opener).

If there is one criticism of this clear and well-researched guide it is that the vibrancy and voices of the ordinary people taking part in these endeavours doesn’t fully come across. And it is the enthusiasm and reciprocity that is commonly experienced from regenerating the earth together and creating a future within the neighbourhood that makes this modern “call to spades” so attractive. Dig it!

Charlotte Du Cann

This Low Carbon Life

Monday Oats From Garboldisham

Thinking about starting a blog today. I wanted to keep a log of everything that happens in this year of TN2, when a bunch of us decided to cut our carbon footprint by half. I wanted to write about the people I’m embarking on this journey with and the small surprising things that happen as we exchange news of our lives. At the last meeting we listed what small steps we had already made and Mark said: every morning he ate porridge made from oats from Garboldisham which is a mill just outside Diss. Later he got all the bills out over the living room floor and made the astounding discovery that our oil bill has decreased by 75% from 2003. What did we do in those blissful days before we knew about peak oil and the economic downturn? Were we eating the stuff?

Actually we were looking at plants. Wild plants, food plants, medicine plants. One thing I learned from looking at plants and plant medicine all those years. It’s the small changes that really affect the body and mind. So long as you pay attention to them.

Josiah once told me oats are the food of the future because they are native, hardy, don’t need pesticides and are very nutritious. Oats are a good medicine too. Excellent for calming you down, cutting anxiety so you see clearly what lies ahead.

It’s August and I’ve decided to take things easy myself! I’m having a zero-carbon holiday and have just put my tent up in the garden under the greengage tree. At night I lie in the dark listening to the seawind flapping in the rigging. It reminds me of being on a boat. The moon rises red from above the black trees, Jupiter shines like a beacon between the clouds. On the distance there are huge ships casting an ominous orange glare over the dark ocean. They’ve been there for months. Must be at least nineteen of them. Must find out what they are.


Wednesday Swimming in the Sea

Found out what those ships were talking to an ex-oil tanker/rig worker outside the Sailor’s Reading Rooms in Southwold. He said they were empty oil tankers and they were anchored there because it was cheaper than being in harbour. Then Josiah wrote in the log that actually the ships were not empty at all: Sole Bay is one of tthe only places in the world where you can legally (sic) transfer oil ship-to-ship and many of them were just waiting for the oil prices to rise. I don’t know which is more of an omen, full oil tankers or empty oil tankers on the horizon. I’m going swimming most days at the moment. It’s calm and the town beach is full of holiday makers. It’s odd but when you are in the sea with everyone, riding the waves like seals, sleek heads bobbing, you feel at home with your kind in a way that is quite difficult when you’re on dry land.

One week later Andy came down with his nephews and put a mighty-sized three man tent in the garden. Here I am with Ollie about to embark on a swimming-in-the-rough-sea lesson. First rule of resilience: enter the waves boldly, come what may!

Christine wrote about strip washing today in the TN2 log. Funny, when you are living in a tent you don’t feel like washing. You’ re not so prissy. You can pee in the compost, walk barefoot in the dew, eat plums without washing them, let the salt stay in your hair. You feel closer to things and yourself. Went down to the wood today and saw all the late summer flowers – skullcap, fleabane, angelica. On my way back I filled my pockets with yellow plums and hazelnuts and picked a punnet of wild cherries. It seems as if everyone is mapping the fruit trees of the neighbourhood at the moment in England – unwanted apples and pears in the back yards of Hackney, Sheffield and Beccles. We’re learning the art of gleaning, paying attention to the small things. When you’re focussed on the small things that’s when the beauty of life strikes you – the surprising sharpness of wild raspberries on your tongue.

What’s the pay-off? you might ask as we all face this low-carbon future without being able to escape in aeroplanes, without tropical fruit, without hot power showers. I’m discovering it this week: living on the earth is the pay-off. Swimming in the sea and feeling its energy and light enter your bones, feeling at home with your fellows as you run down the beach resiliently, come what may.

Midsummer Transition Party

It poured with rain but the resilient Transition Party crew carried on having a good time. Our idea was to share ideas and have some fun in a low-carbon way. So most people cycled or walked up the hill towards Mousehold Heath where we gathered under the willow and apple trees of the Ranger’s House. Everyone brought a sustainable dish. Children made fabric sunflowers and flowery paper. We learned about making felt slippers and herbal highballs, drank home-made elderflower cup and ate home-grown strawberries and cherries. Tom sang with his cycle-powered dynamo and Su told stories. We swapped clothes and books at the “Old is the New New” stall and wrote our thoughts in the Norwich Green guide and the Writing in Transition diary. Later we had a jam session in the Triple Crunch tent and proved that a spot of stormy weather doesn’t need to get you down.

Kerry having a antipodean blast in the triple crunch tent. Bridget provided the info on all aspects of climate science and peak oil, as well as the best shelter.


Dan’s veggie BBQ. Everyone brought food to share. Dishes ranged from Home-made bread to Elena’s fierce and feisty pickled onions. People brought home-picked cherries and strawberries, We were gathering recipes from resilient cooks for TN’s Transition Cookbook – a collection of low-carbon dishes with info about food miles, fair-trade etc. for their main ingredients, which we hope to develop with the Food Group.

Getting serious about herbs. Mark W in the Triple Crunch tent teaches the key ingredients in his Herbal Highball – a mix of 22-odd plants and herbs that made the base of the Party’s Elderflower Cup. Here we are all tuning into Salad Burnet from the Rose Family, whose feathery leaves, as it’s name suggests, also made a good salad ingredient.

Sustainable tea anyone? Mark at the serving hatch with his home-made elderflower cordial and herbal highball. You could have it straight or with local organic cider. Or you could check out the crew’s fresh mint tea, or local apple juice from different apples.

Solstice circle and chill-out zone. Charlotte’s sunrise collection of wild flowers and midsummer medicine plants from the hedgerows and field margins in local honey jars, including yarrow, mugwort, field poppy, agrimony and st john’s wort.

The Ranger’s House is on the edge of the heath and fringed by heathland gorse and broom, foxgloves, red campions, herb robert, dog rose and elderflowers. Earlier this year, Heart and Soul arranged a walk around Mousehold with the heath’s community officer, Will to check out the history and restoration work of Norwich’s principle wild territory.

Once Upon A Time Under Jo’s rainbow umbrella we’re optimistically singing Here Comes the Sun (it should have been singing in rain) and We Can Work It Out, which we decided should be our Transition anthem. while Su keeps spinning those Transition tales.

Ptolemy (youngest member of NR3) stealing the show. Tom accompanying him with his cycle-powered dynamo and kept the party rocking.

All photographs by Helen Simpson Slapp

Spring Tonic Walk

One of the main things about getting involved in a Transition Initiative for me was the realisation that I might actually be able to share some of what I know with others who might be interested. In the meetings, particularly the TN Heart and Soul, Arts, Culture and Well-Being ones I'd been attending, I was keenly aware of sitting in a room with all sorts of different people, every one of us with something of value we could do or share.

I'd been working with plants, especially wild and medicinal ones, for many years and in many places. So I organised a Reconnection with Nature walk with Charlotte in coastal Suffolk where we live and invited fellow Transitioners from Transition Norwich and Sustainable Bungay, where we've been most active, to spend the day with us getting to know some of the neighbourhood plants. The main thrust of the day was to inspire others to get in touch with the plants and trees growing where they live.

We based the day on three Transition plants, Nettle, Cleavers and Dandelion - traditional herbs used to spring clean the system and help the body “transit” from winter into Spring. The walk itself was an introduction to many food and hedgerow medicines such as burdock, hawthorn, rosehip, ground ivy, damson and garlic mustard, and a guide to the main native trees. The day also featured a slide show and a delicious shared lunch, including Nettle Soup and a Cleavers Plus Tea.

Setting off down the lane. There were young alexanders growing in profusion. This is when they can be used as a pot vegetable. To be honest I find them a bit, well not that tasty. But they are edible and maybe there are better ways to cook them than I have tried so far. When the flowers come out in early summer the smell is lovely, like honey.

Remember to be sure of correctly identifying any plant before you eat it. Going out with someone who knows the plants is always the best bet.

Here I am showing fellow transitioners Butcher's Broom, a native and prickly plant in the lily family, aka knee holm.

Eighteen people took part in what was a lively and enjoyable event. Karen told us the next week that she had spent the rest of the weekend totally immersed in getting to know the wild plants in her neighbourhood, seeing cleavers everywhere and tasting all sorts of plants she never knew were edible before.

 

Photos: Tincture and Book Table by Josiah Meldrum; Discovering Butcher's Broom by Helen Simpson Slapp; Signature Oak by Karen Alexander