Lockdown Love, Episode 1 – FOOD! – Transition Town Tooting

Lockdown has been in place here in the UK since the middle of March and had a huge affect on our activities. We had to improvise quick, like everyone, and adapt to a rapidly changing context of how we live, where we live.

Over the early weeks, our growing core group found our niches and put what energy we each had into developing outward facing projects to help our community, both near and far, using networks nurtured with love for over 10 years.

Over the next few days, we’ll be posting what’s live and how you can get involved. We’ll be sharing projects about public space and building community with more posts cooking up.

Never know, Transition Town Tooting maybe fertile ground for collaboration with you!

This episode is all about food and offers four projects: Vegetanuary! – an online group focused on celebrating and sharing vegetarian and vegan cooking; Foodival2020 begins! A callout to share food growing stories and a date for the diary as we stretch to imagine our annual food festival in September; Tooting Community Garden has been sharing the wonders of nature in Spring and looks to future projects and our Neighbourhood Seed Swap in direct response to a huge spike in interest in growing your own. Do read on…

Vegetanuary!

Vegetanuary! was already an online group focused on exploring vegetarian and vegan foods during January each year. It was a no-brainer to re-imagine the group and apply to lockdown to share recipes, support each other and encourage experimentation for people’s wellbeing. Click here to join.

Over the last 10 weeks, this group has grown from 150 to over 200 people from Tooting and beyond. We have contributors from Colombia, Sweden, China the USA and more. The pictures show 3 course meals with locally foraged ingredients. Anyone know what ramsons are? Answers in the comments please!

As lockdown eases in the UK this coming Monday, the group, based on Facebook, are sharing recipes for picnics and BBQs. Could be dips or pickles, bread or cakes, flans or tarts, salads or jelly, sweet or savoury. What would you make?

Foodival 2020

The Foodival team are variously working as chefs, delivery drivers and mental health support workers in their spare time under lockdown. We are not yet certain what form the annual sustainable food festival will take, but Saturday 12th September is the date in the diary when we still hope to do something.

There has been more growing and enjoying outdoor spaces over the last couple of months and we are particularly interested in hearing people’s growing stories. Please connect with Tooting Foodival via the TTT email or on Instagram @tootingfoodival to share your story! grow|cook|create|reduce|reuse|recycle

Tooting Community Garden

We’ve been gardening behind 5 North Drive for many years now and are hugely grateful to Naseem and Mushkil Aasaan for supporting our growing projects there. Pre-Lockdown, we always opened the space every Sunday, from 11am to 1pm, pretty much without fail. Personally, I loved hearing the stories fo “8 people from 8 different countries of the world” attending the space – a human representation of celebrating diversity found in nature.

Lockdown has meant the garden is tended by the core group, exercising physical isolation, but shared religiously every week. Here’s last week’s post, written from the heart:

“Another weekend of spending time in the garden without our community- but lots of things

to do and precious moments to enjoy.
The sage is buzzing with bees. I would love to taste that honey. The sunflowers have gone in…waiting for the squashes to share the space with them. Lots of window sill planting… waiting to find a space in the garden.
The first raspberry is out. If it weren’t so dry…let’s see if they make it.
And some tidying up jobs… finding a treasure box (of tools???) And a very tidy bottle shed.
Compost sieved for more potting and we even tested the soil for acidity levels. And … there should be lots of brambles for those pies for later on.

Hope to see you soon”

The group is looking forward to hosting children groups in the Summer and needs help re-imagining the unsafe play equipment, might you want to join in? Get in touch via transitiontowntooting@gmail.com or the garden facebook group.

Neighbourhood Seed Swop

Tooting is quite a large area, consisting of neighbourhoods within it – Furzedown, Tooting Bec, Amen Corner… In light of lockdown and a huge surge in people wanting to grow their own, we started a hyper-local seed swop in Furzedown. Well, a seed, plant swop and gardening advise exchange actually, based on WhatsApp, allowing people close by to offer or request seeds or plants. Extraordinary plants have been exchanged, the champion of all being a Bangladeshi bottle gourd!

If you’d like to get involved in Furzedown or to find out how to set up a seed/plant/advice exchange in your area, get in touch transitiontowntooting@gmail.com