Ear To The Ground: Can we be self-sufficient in a small valley?
CAN we be self-sufficient in a small valley?
The by-word in self sufficiency at the moment is IET or Incredible Edible Todmorden.
The organisation is forging ahead after its first conference earlier this month, and has a bumper website of information.
Did you know there are around 24 local producers of eggs who sell straight from the hen run?
Maybe there is one round the corner from you.
I wish my best hen would go back to laying in the shed with the others.
IET's rallying cry is "Growing and campaigning for local food" and at their conference at Todmorden High School , Val Morris of Pennine Housing remarked on the importance of encouraging residents who live in areas of social housing to get involved, help produce and eat wholesome local-grown food and not be addicted to-mass produced meals.
It's hard, though, to wean yourself off ready-made stuff in convenient packaging, laced with tasty fats, artificial flavouring and preservatives.
The food profiteers cash in on our tendency to be lazy.
Here's an anecdote told to me recently
A friend of mine taught in a primary school in a large area of social housing.
They had started a breakfast club, because many of the children were coming to school without eating breakfast, or just grabbing a packet of crisps on the way.
They had a box of apples given by a local resident with a bounteous tree, so Lesley gave them out as a mid-morning snack.
The empty box was put at the front of the class for the children to pop their cores in.
It seemed most of them had never been shown how to eat an apple.
Most of them munched the whole lot, cores and all!
In my own experience, small children love small fruit, like blueberries or cherry tomatoes.
When they see their parents eating brightly coloured slivers of sweet pepper, celery and carrot, they are usually all too keen to copy.
They don't respond to being forced, and they don't need any salty dips.
They love the simple tastes when they get used them.
Also they are fascinated to watch adults slicing vegetables, and what nicer way to spend time with children, with a good chopping board, and a good vegetable knife – one of life's pleasures, and when they're old enough, of course, they want to try it too.
A warning comes with raw carrots cut into rounds – they can be a choking hazard. They are best cut into sticks for little ones.
When I was a kid, stuck in on a rainy day, I would see my mother peeling apples.
I loved watching the strips of green pouring from her knife-blade.
She would put some of the peel in a paper bag with a little sugar, shake it up, and give it us kids to share as a biting-on till the crumble was ready.
A spoonful of sugar in a bag was also useful to dip a stalk of raw rhubarb in, but the sugar never lasted as long as the rhubarb!
Many of us are partial to a bit of cheese.
Yorkshire hillsides were probably never suitable to field-scale arable farming.
They are however ideal for grazing animals.
If we want to shop local in this department there are now at least two cheese makers.
There is the Calderdale Cheese Company, Hubberton, near Sowerby and the Pextenement Cheese Company, Todmorden.
Of course, we also have two cheese shops, one in the indoor market at Todmorden, and the other in town centre of Hebden Bridge.
Both the cheese makers talk about the organic status of their products.
This is claimed to make a real difference to the nutritive qualities of the food especially in the case of dairy.
Personally I like organic farming.
Yes, it’s slightly more expensive, but what’s more important than what we put in our stomach, and the environment we live in?
News from Hebden Bridge gardeners
Open gardens
THE Open Gardens event will be part of the Arts Festival again in 2010 after a break last year.
Sue Fenton will be co-ordinating the event and is asking for anyone interested in opening their garden to contact her on suefentontrain@yahoo.com or by telephone on 01422 844906.
Sue says “Your garden does not need to be RHS standard! Visitors are interested in the wonderful variety of gardens from pots and window boxes to hillside terraces and allotments, flowers and veggies.
“It’s always interesting to see how different people rise to the challenge of the terrain, the soil, and the slugs!”
l PRIZES for local gardeners at the West Yorkshire Organic Group Show at the Shipley Festival in September included: Best overwintering red onions for Kerry McQuade, of Birchcliffe Allotment Society; best bread for Mike Barrett, with his foccaccia.
l THE annual show of the Hebden Bridge Chrysanthemum Society was held on November 7, bringing a wealth of colour to the town, and reminding us how important it is to sooth all our senses from time to time.
The vigour of the blooms and enthusiasm of the growers were testament to a busy year, from tiny cuttings in spring to the bursting of the colour from the buds in autumn.
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Weather for Halifax
Saturday 11 February 2012
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: -1 C to 0 C
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