FEATURE Grown your own
n By Mark Metcalf The Bolton ‘Good Life’ Nothing beats the value of veg – grown in your own back yard
A Bolton community food growing permaculture project that aims to address food and resource poverty in social deprived areas by helping people to grow food in their yards and gardens has created hundreds of online YouTube short documentaries to help provide advice on growing your own fruit and veg.
A recent University of Sheffield study has found that household fruit and vegetable production, in allotments and gardens, could be key to a healthy and food-secure population.
It discovered those who grow their own can produce more than half of the vegetables (51 per cent) and 20 per cent of the fruit they consume annually. The Community Roots Permaculture Project is run by former Ruskin College student and food sovereignty
advocate, Steve Jones with Ben Blackburn. The pair share a food growing site in Southfields Pub, Great
Lever with local food activists, the Bolton Diggers.
Their YouTube channel “combines Community food growing,
permaculture, outdoor skills and activities as a means of moving away from the destructive way of doing things towards a world more in tune with nature and each other.”
Currently many people are really struggling amid the cost-of-living crisis that is resulting in fresh fruit and vegetable prices rocketing.
The five minute documentary Grow Your Own Food shows how a stretch
of garden 18 feet long has been turned into a veritable feast production line, costing virtually nothing in cash terms with most things scavenged or borrowed or, in the case of some pots, donated via former cannabis growers from the police!
Happily growing staples, despite the Greater Manchester weather, are carrots, beetroot, salad crops, sweetcorn, courgettes, radish, sage, beans of different varieties, chives, rosemary, mint, strawberries, garlics, seed potatoes, pink gooseberries, celery, red cabbage, cherries, squash and even grapevine. Many of the products can be harvested two or
three times a year.
“All of this food is nutritious. People are using foodbanks – but most of the products there are highly processed. It will keep you alive,” explains Steve, “but it is not healthy. Someone in a flat who can grow something on a windowsill could then eat something nourishing that’s better for their health.”
Fruit roots Another group, Community Roots has started a Community Fruit Trees Project giving access to fruit for people on low and no incomes.
The proliferation of trees into an urban area will additionally attract pollinators and other beneficial insects, and thirdly trees could help by absorbing carbon and releasing oxygen.
Find out more
On Bolton Growers you can contact @BoltonUrban Steve Jones on 07821 847092
sj1j1@hotmail.com
WATCH
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6 _Rf0f8u-3c
www.youtube.com/@URBAN PERMACULTURE/videos
28 uniteLANDWORKER Winter 2023/24
Mark Harvey
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