Viva Brighton Issue #68 October 2018

FEATURE
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It’s a peri-urban space only 15 minutes
from the city centre. Most of us
cycle here. The quiet and stillness, the
nature that you see… there’s a sense of
wellbeing, of being grounded. It definitely
calms you down.
A diverse range of people come here,
from school children, who couldn’t
believe potatoes come out of the soil,
to pensioners with years of growing
experience. We can’t grow enough produce
to supply demand, and so we offer a yearlong
free traineeship. We teach how to
grow organic fruit or vegetables so that
people can do so on their balconies or in
their gardens, their allotments, or even
by setting up their own project like ours.
Our ability to feed ourselves is central to
everyone’s future.
We use the no-dig method, which takes
out a lot of the labour. We follow only
traditional organic principles and practices.
I call it sensitive land management, so
rather than disrupting the living soil with
its millions of microorganisms, we only dig
where we need to… We know that if we
look after the soil, the crops pretty much
look after themselves.
There’s a very deep food revolution
going on… Brighton is full of food
projects. There are over 70 community
gardens. We’ve already got the Silver
Sustainability Food Award and we want to
get the Gold. I think we can. We’re leading
the way, with Bristol and Manchester.
It’s about respecting the planet we
live on, and caring for it. I think Satish
Kumar encompasses it so well in his three
words: Soil, Soul, Society. We need to look
after the soil, the health of our planet, for
our planet to look after us. We need to
change! As told to Chloë King
forkanddigit.co.uk
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