Through writing about her own experience of developing her neighbourhood ‘lawn’ into a viable food source, she illustrates that ‘growing food’ does not necessarily need to be limited to just those with the privilege of having a garden or allotment. Her words take on additional importance when one considers the recent report by the Office for National Statistics. The report (focused on Britain) demonstrated that, not only do one in eight households have no access to a garden, but within these figures lies great ethnic disparity, with black people four times less likely than white people to have access to their own outdoor space. 

By Sarah Gomes Harris

Cavolo Nero on the ‘lawn’
PICTURE: Sarah Gomes Harris

I’ve found myself looking at lawns a lot lately. There is so much of it everywhere, and people hold their lawn in almost holy reverence. I feel as though everyone is genuflecting at the altar of the divine ‘God of Topsoil’, reading from the same pocket bible of ‘miracle-gro’, the one that states, ‘thou shall mow every second Friday in June’. 

We are still in the throes of a badly handled pandemic and, as I look into the patches of green, I imagine myself a year from now. My industry is struggling from lack of investment, the savings I finally got together for a home are spent, and I’m relying on a foodbank that is buckling because so many of its usual donors have been made redundant and are now reliant on handouts themselves. People are uncharacteristically aggressive and self-preserving. I’m reduced to feebly staring at the lawn around the foodbank, wishing it were full of aubergines.

We need anything BUT lawn.

I live in a rented conversion flat with no garden and allotments are almost a two-year waiting list. So I started planting a communal garden on our street with flowers and edible leaves, trying not to make it too obvious I was on a food poverty mission. I stuck with the odd sculptural bit of Cavolo Nero and chicory, which went largely unnoticed among the flowers. After some time, the garden began receiving comments (good ones!) and donations of a cherry tree, rosemary bush, cauliflower, courgettes and peas came flooding in. Recently, parents and their kids have been out planting too. Now, flowers with their tags appear overnight and we have a mystery lawnmower man mowing every week. Although, I still live in fear of dogs taking a dump on the rhubarb – until street growing is normalised, people will continue to think their dog’s bowels take priority over starvation. 

Baskets of strawberries and tomatoes
PICTURE: Sarah Gomes Harris

In my opinion, anyone on the brink of food poverty needs to know that a relatively small piece of lawn (even a square metre) can be turned over to grow food. We need to assert that we can grow food on ‘common’ land. We need to be growing strawberries off of lamp posts while walls of nutritious spinach and rocket could be lining our twittens and wrapped around our railings. And, has anyone noticed the shopping centre is one giant greenhouse? We could be replacing a good chunk of the fruit and veg we import, at the same time as transforming it into a space of beauty and well-being. Sites due for development (that will very likely end up standing empty due to the oncoming recession) could be turned into community farms; it is inexcusable and irresponsible not to make the most of this opportunity.

Sarah’s current project: leaf filled tetra packs to hang in a twittern
PICTURE: Sarah Gomes Harris

Whatever your feelings about Maduro, he has at least given the people of Venezuela permission to ‘grow food anywhere they can’. Meanwhile, Boris and his faulty joystick Cummings have been playing at lowering food safety standards with the US, a country in which 1 in 6 people fall ill with food poisoning each year as opposed to 1 in 66 here (yorkshirebylines.co.uk). We, the community, have the power to take over the controls and to take food growing back into our own hands.

• Sarah recently appeared to talk more about her guerrilla gardening on Episode 3 of ‘The Common Treasury’ series; find the discussion on Facebook at ‘Isolation Station Hastings’. 

For those wanting to get started on their own growing journey, Sarah recommends these resources

For information
• Local permaculture expert Anna Locke’s affordable garden forest course (‘Anna Locke Permaculture’ on Facebook)
• ‘Hastings & St Leonards Garden Friends’ (on Facebook): a network of volunteer gardeners promoting biodiversity and supporting vulnerable individuals to garden. They also have future plans to start a community garden in a long-disused playground
• ‘The Dig Deep Garden Group’ on Facebook has a plethora of expertise
• Talk to your neighbours! Post a note through everyone’s door with your number on it and set up a gardening WhatsApp group

For Plants/seeds
• Alexandra Park Greenhouse Group have been helpful with cheap plants and advice. They need more footfall and fundraising help as the greenhouse is in desperate need of repair work before next winter or it will fall apart www.greenhousealexpark.com
• ‘Garden Gems’ nursery garden-gems.co.uk
• Email local allotments each year to see if they have any seeds
or seedlings spare 
• ‘Hastings Give & Takery’ on Facebook for seed swaps
• Gardening mags often contain enough free seeds to get one started

By Pasha Milburn

While many businesses are currently struggling, agroecological farmer, Abby Nicol, of Pea Pod Veg farm (see also Issue 144), has found herself with a long waiting list of prospective customers. “It’s a blessing that we’ve been able to continue our work,” she tells me over the phone, “In a crisis people value being able to access local food when supermarkets are struggling.” Could this be the time to rethink the suitability of our current food system and consider the potential that small-scale farming has for feeding our communities? I spoke to Abby to learn more about what creating a community-orientated, sustainable and accessible food system in Hastings and St Leonards could look like. 

Abby Nicol of Pea Pod Veg

Curious Crops and Community Values

Run by Abby Nicol and her partner, Thad Skewes, Pea Pod Veg began its life in 2016. While working at Little Pannel Farm (Pett), and noticing that most of their produce went to Brighton, Abby was inspired to start her own veg box scheme so that “locally grown veg could feed the local community”. However, when the lease on Pannel was abruptly terminated, Abby had to look for new growing space to enable her to continue with her burgeoning business. In winter of 2017, she managed to secure two acres at an organic dairy farm outside of Hailsham, and now in their third year of farming here, Pea Pod Veg is growing from strength to strength.

What makes Pea Pod Veg stand out is that it is a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) scheme (http://community supportedagriculture.org.uk). CSA works to address the challenges (such as sustainability and transparency) in our current food system by encouraging a stronger relationship between farmers and consumers. While there is no overall model for a CSA, all are built upon a similar ‘mutual risk’ approach, where both risks and rewards are shared with consumers. In Pea Pod’s case, individuals sign up, committing to a ‘share of the harvest’ for a whole year and pay each month for boxes that are delivered weekly or fortnightly. For Abby, the beauty of being a CSA scheme is the potential it offers in building further human connection through food. As Abby tells me: 

“CSA creates a mutually beneficial relationship, and in doing so moves beyond the basic understanding of what makes a ‘consumer’ or an economic transaction. It has developed as a model against the ‘convenience’ factor that is encouraged by supermarkets, by recognising that food is a chain of connections, culture and relationships.” 

Abby also provides a personal touch through producing a regular newsletter for members that educates them on farming challenges or how to eat seasonally, and includes recipes on what can be made with the “curious crops” they may find in their box that week. Future plans of Abby’s include hosting ‘community workdays’ so members can develop a more tangible understanding as to where their food is coming from.  

Food after Covid

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought into stark perspective what can happen when the food supply chains (that we so often take for granted) are disrupted and in doing so has raised uncomfortable yet vital questions of who benefits and who struggles during times of crisis. I ask Abby what her ideal local food system looks like:

“I would love to see this as a moment when people are like ‘yes, local food!’ I think Covid has shown there is a demand for local farmers. We do have to buy in from other countries as it isn’t possible to grow everything we need, but we should still prioritise growing as much as we possibly can. I would love to see a network or a co-operative of community supported agriculture throughout East Sussex (and beyond) with lots of independent farms working together to feed communities.” 

However, before a larger network of horticultural farms can be created, she suggests there needs to be both national policy changes, and cultural and strategic shifts in valuing small-scale farming as a viable career. “Everything is against small farms from existing,” Abby says, “There’s no political or infrastructure support, plus there’s a skills gap in supporting new farmers to work.” Further to this, farms under five hectares (such as Pea Pod) are not eligible for government subsidies, making an already high-risk business even more vulnerable. 

It is important to recognise that eating seasonally and buying ‘local’ produce is expensive and not a viable option for many individuals. This is something Abby acknowledges:

“It’s difficult to feel accessible to everyone, but we try to keep our prices as low as we can and have a degree of flexibility with our monthly payments. However, we do also need to value our food and the work that goes into it. When we’ve compared our prices to supermarket ranges (such as the organic equivalents) we’re actually cheaper. Plus, the freshness of our produce means the taste and nutritional differences are huge”. 

There has been much recent debate regarding the ‘true’ cost of cheap food (when one accounts for the exploitative labour conditions for workers, environmental impact and related health issues) and the complete overhaul of our current system needed to rectify this. Abby reflects: 

“The industrial food model is an inefficient system. There’s so much food being produced, yet so many people (in the UK) who can’t afford that food. How we feed our communities is related to wider societal factors, and with community farming, I think we need to start to question: how can we feed people on a daily basis?” 

As members of ‘The Landworkers Alliance’ union (a member-led union of farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers; https://landworkersalliance.org.uk/) and connected to the global food sovereignty movement, ‘La Via Campesina’ (https://viacampesina.org/en/), Abby and Thad root themselves strongly within a global political movement fighting for a better food system. With new UK agriculture bills being currently debated in parliament, Abby feels that “this is a great time to educate oneself and get involved in building a better food system that works for everyone”. That this pandemic may become a catalyst for change in Hastings and St Leonards is one positive to emerge out of the darkness.

• To sign up to the waiting list for Pea Pod Veg, go to www.peapodveg.co.uk 
Pea Pod can be found on Instagram and Facebook: @peapodveg

You can join the discussion about local food production and what can be learned from other projects at an event organised by the Hastings Green Party at 12 noon, Saturday 22nd February at All Saints Hall in All Saints Street. This event follows the Green Party’s AGM but is open to all, of any political persuasion (or none). All local food and growing groups are invited to share their knowledge and expertise.

Abby Nicol on her farm

Emily O’Brien, Policy and Partnerships Manager for Brighton & Hove Food Partnership, will talk about The Surplus Food Network, an alliance of organisations tackling food waste by working with suppliers to distribute surplus to people in need in Brighton, Hove and surrounding areas. 

The Food Partnership is nationally acclaimed for its work to join the dots in the food system strategically alongside practical projects like their successful Community Kitchen. As Emily says: “Connecting up organisations leads to funding opportunities and a stronger voice.”

There are already the beginnings of a similar network in Hastings and the meeting will discuss how it can be expanded. Abby Nicol is the founder of Pea Pod Veg, a working example of small-scale organic agriculture feeding our local community. She will be talking about how to set up small-scale organic vegetable production to increase the capacity to feed people locally and how to create a local food network.

The discussion will finish off with some bread and soup made with vegetables from Pea Pod (small donation requested). 

• Please book in advance so there’s enough soup tinyurl.com/foodandgrowing