A humble potato day in a little village hall in
the middle of nowhere (pace the residents of Castle Cary) in Somerset
might seem an unlikely setting for the beginnings of a revolution.But as I walked around picking out this year's little bundles of treasure, it occurred to me that everybody in that room was uncomplicatedly and happily going about the task of undermining the establishment – those people who tell you what you can and can't grow, what varieties of potato you're 'allowed' to buy.
They were doing so with a smile on their faces: peacefully, yet astonishingly effectively. You could see it from the sparkles in their eyes, the excitement as they dithered over 'Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy' or 'Vitelotte' and riffled through the paper seed packets or scooped up a generous mugful of shallot sets. It was the excitement of the person who knows they're in on something – and that it's really, really good.
Of course, it's partly just the joy of gardening:
there are few occupations which bring on outbreaks of unadulterated
cheeriness in quite the same way.
But I think there's something else going on here.
You see, I've seen those expressions before, at seed swaps, on the
face of the lady I spoke to about Transition Town Totnes, in the eyes
of the rapt audience watching a beekeeper go about his work at an
allotment open day in Brighton.
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| Quiet revolutionaries? |
But what they're doing is, undeniably, sticking
two fingers up at the status quo, at the vested interests, at the
government diktats: rejecting all that, and going their own way.
So far it's also a minority, though a growing one.
It's noticeably middle-class in its concerns and interests, but I
don't see why that makes it any less valid. I find its various
manifestations incredibly inspiring, well beyond the initial rather
woolly and slightly irrelevant impression they might give at first.
In fact, they couldn't be more relevant. They give
me hope for the future.
Here's how you, too, can join the revolution:
Potato Days (Jan-March): now
happening at a village hall near you. A wonderful opportunity to join
other like-minded people in rifling through tubers with unlikely
names, eat a great deal of cake and – if you go to one of the
larger ones – find out a fair bit about local heritage and
gardening. I have no idea how it works to cement a community: but it
does.
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| It is - like all the best revolutions - fuelled on copious quantities of cake |
National Beanpole Week (April): if
forests (or at least, woodlands) are your thing, you can get down
with the woodsmen at coppicing events around the country. Those who
manage the coppiced woodlands in our countryside are often a hidden
community: this is the week they come out of the woods and join in
with everyone else. Events are community affairs, with demonstrations
of traditional crafts, and an encouragement for gardeners to use more
locally-sourced, sustainable coppicing products in what they do.
National Allotment Week (August): find
out what your local allotments are doing and get to know what a
strong community you can forge by just exchanging tips over the plot
fence. Many are much more than just a load of people growing veg:
Moulsecoomb, in Brighton, have started a forest garden which provides
gardening therapy to some of the most disadvantaged kids in the area.
They keep bees, too.
and if you're
serious about your revolutionary tendencies:
Community Supported Agriculture: farms run
cooperatively by local communities. Now embraced by the National Trust, until recently firmly establishment but
becoming more and more revolutionary by the day. They're running four
CSA farms, notably the MyFarm setup at their Wimpole Estate in Cambridgeshire - so democratic that
members vote on what to grow and how to raise the animals.
The
Transition Town movement is sweeping
the country, having migrated here, like the CSA movement, from across the Atlantic. The most
established is Totnes, not a million miles from here (where they grow
lettuces for amenity planting) and it's spreading to dozens of towns from
Brighton to Melrose in the Scottish Borders.
It covers so much more than gardening, although
growing things is the fuel behind the whole scheme: the thinking is
that the entire town becomes self-sufficient, disengaging itself from
globalisation and the wider nation and producing its own food, its
own energy, its own support systems. It therefore - the thinking is -
becomes more resilient, less at the mercy of a whim-led government.
If you follow that to its logical conclusion, soon we won't need governments at all. Now there's a revolutionary thought: it might just
be that the seeds of change are to
be found in our gardens.
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