Transition Bedford

I came across this video on the Transition Culture blog. The narrator and creator of the "6 Steps of Community Engagement" is  James Samuel, a founder of Transition in New Zealand, and publisher of the blog Yesterday’s Future.  If you have seen ‘In Transition’, James is the guy discussing Oooby with the outrageous shirt.  He was recently asked to give a talk to a local CSA project, giving them some ideas for how to manage their project.  He developed a 6 stage process which looks like a good way of looking at creating successful projects.  You can see his presentation below, and read a transcript of it here on the Transition Culture site. If would be great to get everyone's comments (both from Transition Bedford and from other Transition groups) on these ideas, as I'm sure all your insights will help us.

Green alkanet grows everywhere and its flowers are edible

In the last few years I've become rather attracted to the idea of foraging for food. Having had an allotment in the past, and knowing the time and work that goes into growing veg, the idea of going out into the wider environment to find sources of food which have cost me nothing in monetary and effort terms is very, very attractive.

On a recent trip to Conwy in Wales, the bushes alongside farm lanes were dripping with sloes, rosehips and blackberries. But what about here in (sub)urban Bedford, what's to be found for foraging?

I've lived in the town for a year now and found a few places to find wild food: sea buckthorn, damsons, blackberries and rosehips at Priory Marina; crab apples in the streets around Castle Road, elderberries on the footpath off Caves Lane and green alkanet (pictured above - you can eat the lovely blue flowers) and hairy bittercress all over the place. if you're a forager, please share your haunts below in the comments...

So, let's say everyone gets into the idea of foraging - what then? Will there be enough to go around or will we be fighting over those damsons, rowans and bittercress? I suspect we've got a while before this is a problem, but it's worth thinking about.

Right now, though, the difficulty is getting people to pick even the obvious fruit outside their front doors. There's a street off Castle Road (I can't remember which one: maybe Pembroke?) with a apple tree that was full of little red-skinned, red-fleshed apples in late summer: I think I've identified them as a variety called Red Devil: great to eat and produces beautiful pink juice.

I nearly cried when nobody touched them: the sweet little red apples dropped and were mashed under feet and car tyres, probably driven by people driving to a shop to buy - you guessed it - apples grown half way across the world (and not half as tasty). I'd have brought a ladder and picked them all, but I was a bit worried about how people in the street would react: maybe next year.

If you want to read more of my stuff on organic gardening and ethical consumerism, visit my personal blog, Horticultural, and follow me on Twitter.