Guest Blogs – Seeding Our Future

Tamarisk farm, Haypenny Market Garden and Edible Gardens at St Mary’s Primary

by Candida Dunford Wood and Rosalind Reynolds-Grey Tamarisk farm is polishing barley and experiment with millet Adam Simon says ‘It’s all about increasing resilience. The more we have support from the local community, the more we can experiment with new crops that are suitable to a changing climate.” Just as farmers need to be adaptable … Read more

Grow your own Happiness

60-90-minute online workshop Cultivate your wellbeing with gardening skills! Available for group bookingsWith Alan Heeks In these stormy times, we need new skills to stay happy. A cultivated ecosystem, like a garden, is a role model for human nature: this workshop shows how gardening methods can help you grow your own happiness and deepen the roots of your resilience. For example: Mulching and pruning to nourish your rootsComposting stress as a source of energyUse gardening skills like observation and creativityFind new ways to adapt to the climate crisisDraw inspiration from Nature to guide you in uncertainty Alan Heeks has over 25 years of experience exploring Natural Happiness with groups. It grows from creating a 130-acre organic farm and education centre at Magdalen Farm in West Dorset, and from gardening with his wife at home. In this online workshop, Alan will describe the Seven Seeds of Natural Happiness, and participants will have a chance to try some of them out. Alan is happy to take bookings for this event from environmental, community and other groups, at a time of their choosing for a moderate fee by negotiation. CONTACT LINK
... Read more
NATURAL HAPPINESS: cultivate your resilience with the Gardener’s Way

July 9-11 2021: at Hazel Hill Wood, near Salisbury With Alan Heeks, Jane Sanders and Marcos Frangos How can you stay happy when there’s too much change and uncertainty? This workshop shows you how: to cultivate yourself like a garden, and grow your own wellbeing by learning from natural ecosystems, using Alan’s unique Natural Happiness model. In this workshop we’ll explore these questions, with the natural ecosystem of this magical wood as our guide. Our methods will include: nourishing our roots; composting problems; using co-creative skills to work with nature; growing inspiration; and ecosystem insights about community. Along with workshop sessions, there will be solo times in the wood, plus good food, campfires and songs to nourish us. This will be a residential group at Hazel Hill Wood: if Covid restrictions prevent this, it will be run with a series of online sessions with personal time in between. We will explore how to grow resilience for individuals and communities, especially in response to the climate crisis and the related pandemic. If you are interested in using this model in your professional work with individuals or groups, Alan will be happy to offer you advice and support: the content of this workshop relates to his fourth book, which is planned for publication in late 2021. Alan Heeks has been exploring resilience with people and nature for many years, and has led many groups on this theme, drawing on experience of resilient natural systems from creating an organic farm and setting up Hazel Hill. Jane Sanders has over 25 years’ experience in working with a mindfulness based approach to wellbeing with groups and individuals, and has also incorporated deep ecology, ecopsychology and the wisdom of natural systems into her work in many different settings, including numerous groups at Hazel Hill Wood. Marcos Frangos is widely experienced in group facilitation, coaching, counselling and constellations work. He was General Manager of Hazel Hill Wood for 5 years, and has co- led many groups there with Jane and Alan. Cost including food and accommodation: £220, concessions £180. We will share cooking and other community tasks. To secure a place, we will need a deposit of £40, £30 for concessions: if, nearer the time we have to run this as an event online event, your deposit will cover the cost of this, or you can receive a full refund. Hazel Hill is a magical 70-acre conservation woodland and retreat centre, 7 miles from Salisbury. It has simple, yet beautifully crafted off-grid wooden buildings with lovely indoor and outdoor group spaces, basic accommodation in bedrooms and sleeping lofts (or camping), good hot showers and compost loos. See more at www.hazelhill.org.uk For bookings and enquiries: Please contact Carol Nourse via email on: naturalhappinesscontact@gmail.com
... Read more

Lifestyle sustainability: The New Green Frontier
Why are consumer attitudes to energy saving, and even those of policy makers, so preoccupied with home heating? I think it’s because this is a pretty easy, safe, non-controversial sector. Who could possible object to pensioners getting help with loft insulation, or young couples putting in a wood pellet boiler? Yet the harsh truth is that if every UK home was zero-carbon, through some miraculous mix of super insulation and eco-heating systems, the overall cut in UK energy consumption would be … around 18%. This figure is drawn from the Department of Energy and Climate Change figures for 2009 energy consumption. So where are the big numbers in energy consumption? The DECC figures show transport as 37% of the total: this includes cars and lorry traffic. Other surveys put total energy use for the food sector around 35%: this includes fossil fuels used on the farm as fertilisers, pesticides, tractor fuel, plus the large amounts of energy consumed in manufacturing, packaging, transporting and retailing food. If you look at the Zero Carbon Britain report from the Centre for Alternative Technology, and various other reports, it’s clear that energy consumption for transport and food could be cut massively, and provided from non-fossil fuels to a very large extent. However, these kind of energy savings would require quite severe lifestyle changes, for example: Switching to an almost completely vegetarian diet.Use of battery cars for local travel, and mainly public transport for long distances.Cutting use of air travel to a fraction of the current level. How could such changes come about? It’s hard to imagine any elected Government moving even a quarter of the way along this path. The most likely scenario is extreme necessity, i.e. extreme drops in supply and rises in price of fossil fuels, which despite the current situation, could well happen within the next 25 years. Whether the peak oil crisis is met with positive, systemic solutions, or with riots in the streets and gated enclaves for the wealthy, is one of the biggest questions of our times. Some years ago, I was visiting BedZed, the pioneering eco-housing scheme in South London, with its founder, Bill Dunster, and a bunch of mainstream housing developers. Bill explained how he had set up a supply link with an organic market garden in Kent, with electric pool cars, so that both food and transport energy use could be minimal. One of the developers laughed rudely, and said he would still go to Tesco in his Range Rover. Bill smiled and simply said, “I’m not trying to force anyone to live greener, I’m just trying to make it easy for them”. What I mean by lifestyle sustainability is finding ways which are easy, sociable, enjoyable, for people to change to low-impact habits around food and transport. Key to achieving this is a degree of local community spirit which means there is enough trust and collaboration with people on your doorstep to enable you to share resources with them. Useful pioneers of this approach are the Transition Towns, and the cohousing movement. A community garden at Lynchetts, Bridport Done in the right way, growing your own food can be satisfying healthier, sociable and even recreational. Many cohousing neighbourhoods have a community market garden for just this purpose. Transition Towns often have community orchards, allotments, and garden swap schemes which connect up home owners with unused gardens and people wanting to cultivate them. At the Threshold Centre, the low-impact cohousing neighbourhood which I co-founded in North Dorset, and where I lived for over five years, car ownership was limited to one car per household, and car owners were required to insure their car for other residents to drive. We also had a pool car. Half of the homes at Threshold are for low-income households, and were funded through a housing association: several of these households do not own a car, but have access to one through such arrangements. This means a big saving in their living costs, and much lower car mileage than if everyone actually owned a car: it is well known that ownership tends to increase usage. In recent years, there has been rapid growth in car clubs, which are another way of providing easy access to a car for occasional use. The Stroud Cohousing Neighbourhood were key players in setting up the scheme in that town. Ride-sharing is another great way to cut fossil fuel use, and is made a lot easier through the personal connections which arise in Transition Town groups, cohousing and other forms of local community. At present, the percentage of the UK population involved in these kind of resource-sharing communities must be tiny, and most people would regard these ideas as the province of deep green Guardian readers. How to get the mainstream enthused about these ideas is a massive question. One way to do this, which will horrify many deep greens, is to use the power of the market: if big marketing organisations got into this kind of thing, they could no doubt make it very appealing…
... Read more