Shoppers in Reigate Town Centre will receive a random act of kindness of the fruity kind on Saturday 15 October. From 10am to 3pm, members of Transition Redhill and Growing Redhill will be on the High Street, with a stall near The Market Hotel and Caffè Nero. They will re-distribute fruit, with a take home message to “grow your own”.

The event comes at the same time of year as national Apple Day, which was initiated by Common Ground in 1990.

The juicy bounty will all be collected from local fruit and nut trees, with zero associated ‘air miles’. As well as boxes of fruit gathered before the event, local people are invited to bring unwanted fruit to the stall during the day. Last year, donations were made from fruit trees in gardens of local streets including Eversfield Road, Nutley Lane, Deerings Road, Lonesome Lane and Chart Lane.

Derek Smith, Chair of Transition Redhill, notes there has been a glut of apples this year, probably due to the warm spring weather. He notes that pears ripened very early this year, so are sadly unlikely to be found on the stall. And if apples are not picked soon, they will become windfalls and slowly rot into the soil. He adds windfalls can be frozen now and given to birds throughout the winter. Meanwhile, Surrey shoppers turn to supermarkets for convenience, leaving their own, free and tasty crops to go to waste.

Last year we re-distributed 25 crates of fruit and nuts in what we believe was the first of its kind in Reigate. People told me it was a wonderful event, and should be repeated. I want to collect details from local people with trees willing to donate next year. I also want to spread the message to “grow your own” this Apple Day.

Members of local group, Growing Redhill, will donate Bramley Seedling and Grenadier cooking apples and Cox eating apples to the stall, from their food growing site in Merstham (www.growingredhill.co.uk). This initiative provides mini allotments for growers under the Landshare scheme, pioneered by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (www.landshare.net).

Apple Day was initiated by Common Ground in 1990. It was inspired by the revelation that we have grown about 3,000 varieties of eating, cooking and cider apples in this country, most of which have established provenances, and in discovering the richness of orchards as habitats for wildlife. Common Ground notes that in 2007 we imported nearly 70% of our apples (Defra Basic Horticultural Statistics 2008). Apples from the southern hemisphere and other far away places fill our supermarket shelves – even in Autumn, the height of our apple season. Every Apple Day event is conceived and run by people locally. For more information see the website www.commonground.org.uk.

Apple Day events in Surrey in 2011

(NB. Transition Redhill takes no responsibility for details of these events, which may change, please check websites for details).

RHS Wisley Taste of Autumn Festival - Thursday 20 to Sunday 23 October - A true celebration of all things autumnal. With apple tastings and advice, food and drink stalls, cookery demonstrations and home grown produce. Get your apples identified. www.rhs.org.uk/Gardens/Wisley/What-s-on

Wednesday 21st October – Apple Day at Petersham Nurseries
Help to save our orchards by buying English apples and juices and by celebrating Apple Day. A new selection of British grown fruit trees and bushes includes a wide range of apple varieties including Apple ‘Bountiful’, Apple ‘Braeburn, Apple ‘Charles Ross’, Apple ‘Golden Delicious’, Apple ‘Greensleeves’… and many more. All of the apple trees have been selected for their taste quality and good disease resistance. They are available in a number of forms including bushes, standards and fan-trained, the majority are self-fertile, all are British grown. www.petershamnurseries.com

Saturday 22 October – Transition Dorking 2nd Annual Apple Day Celebration, Dorking High Street in front of Barclay’s from 9am-2pm. Once again they will be pressing apples into fresh juice on the High Street to celebrate Apple Day. Bring along your apple glut and some clean dry containers (a one litre milk jug would be perfect) and go home with some amazing juice to drink or freeze. If you don’t have any apples – come anyway. It’s also a perfect opportunity to chat with about Food Float, Dorking Community Orchard, and Transition Dorking. www.transitiondorking.org.uk

The event comes at the same time of year as national Apple Day, which was initiated by Common Ground in 1990. In 2010, the event falls on 21 October.

The juicy bounty was all collected from local fruit and nut trees, with zero associated ‘air miles’. As well as boxes of fruit gathered before the event, residents also brought unwanted apples and pears to the stall during the day. Donations were made from fruit trees in gardens of local streets, including Eversfield Road, Nutley Lane, Deerings Road, Lonesome Lane and Chart Lane.
Members of local group, Growing Redhill, donated Bramley cooking apples and eating apples from their food growing site in Merstham. Reigate business, Clifton Nursery, offered discounts for fruit trees as part of the initiative.

Rebecca Harris, Chair of Sustainable Redhill, is an avid fruit picker and chutney maker. She notes that plums, cherries, hazelnuts, apples and pears can go unnoticed in our gardens. Meanwhile, Surrey shoppers turn to supermarkets for
convenience, leaving their own, free and tasty crops to go to waste.

Said Harris: ‘Local people reacted extremely positively to this initiative, which we believe is the first of its kind in Reigate. We were extremely busy handing out free fruit from 10am and thanks to publicity from the Surrey Mirror, people made a bee line for the stall. The extra donations of cooking and eating apples and   pears throughoutthe day, meant we could distribute even more. People told me it was a wonderfulevent, and should be repeated. I collected details from local people with trees willing to donate next year. I want to spread the message to “pick your own” this Apple Day’.

We all got to meet the “girls” and see how the ice cream was made. Using automated milking system and an amazing ice cream machine, they are able to get from cow to freezer in under an hour!

We were also able to gain an insight into the tough economics of dairy farming and the unfair trading contracts with the supermarkets. Having switched to production of just ice cream, St Joan’s are able to sell directly to local restaurants, farm shops and directly to you and I from their farm on Flanchford Road.
 
The dairy herd also have lots of space to roam around in the fields around the farm. Farming under these low-intensity methods, with no artificial nasties added to the food, is great for the cows, better for the environment and of course contributes to a fantastic tasting ice cream. For more information on the farm please follow the link below.
 
http://www.saintjoansfarm.com/
 
Thank you to St Joan’s for hosting us!

1. Pull a generous amount of lavender off its stalk with the aid of a fork (or young child) and place in a bowl.

2. In a saucepan, dissolve the caster suger in the water and bring to the boil, then pour over the flowers. Leave to infuse for one hour, then strain. I like to let some of the flowers into the ice cream, but not all.

3. Heat the single cream and vanilla pod gently to a point when a skin forms. You can cut the vanilla pod open to let the seeds out if you want.

4. Beat the egg yolks and add the heated cream slowly with a whisk, then return to saucepan  and stir until it makes a custard. Leave it off the heat to cool.

5.Whip up the double cream and fold the custard into it, adding the lavender water. Remove vanilla pod.

6. Put the mixture into a plastic dish and freeze for one and a half hours.

7. Beat up the mixture with a spoon and refreeze, leaving for another one and a half hours.

8. Beat agin and refreeze and leave one last time for one and a half hours.  

From “Seaweed and eat it” by Fiona Houston and Xa Mailne

Family background

These comments are based on my remembrances of life in my youth – that is from my birth in 1937 to 1955 when I left school for National Service. My father was a bank clerk – that meant that he had a regular salary, but could not be regarded as ‘well-off’ and had no savings or capital. As was usual in those days my mother gave up work on marriage. Of course there were no credit cards. Hire purchase whereby you could buy by monthly payments with interest was sometimes available but considered to be undesirable and known as the ‘never-never’. My parents used it just once to buy a new gas cooker. We lived in a semi-detached house in North London. We had no car, and were sparing in buying consumer goods.

Heating

The house had two sitting rooms. The front room or ‘lounge’ was only used at weekends. I now realise why. It was expensive to heat for limited use on a weekday and lighting the fire and clearing the ash away in the morning was a tedious process which would have fallen to my mother who was a small woman and not physically strong. The back room was the living/dining room – it had a coal fire or we used a two bar electric fire when the room was only occupied briefly. There was a one bar electric fire in the hall.

There were fireplaces in the bedrooms but these were never used and we had no heating there. There was often a thick layer of ice on the inside of the windows in winter. We had hot water bottles at bed time. We left underwear in the airing cupboard in the bathroom overnight so we could dash into the bathroom in the morning to dress.

In the kitchen there was a boiler which heated the hot water tank in the bathroom and provided our hot water supply. It also warmed the kitchen and the airing cupboard. It was lit every day in the winter and this was a tedious and dirty task. In the summer it was only lit on Fridays, which was traditionally bath night.. A gas water heater (known as a ‘geyser’) in the bathroom and later an immersion heater provided limited hot water when the boiler was not on. Showers were not a feature of bathrooms so most days we just had a thorough wash and then a weekly bath.

Monday was washing day. We only changed underwear and shirts once a week as washing was hard work. BO was a problem – which we all shared! Originally we had a gas heated copper on the gas stove, later replaced by a washing machine that rotated the clothes in a tub. They had then to be fed manually into a very heavy electric wringer. By the late 1950s we had a twin tub machine which still meant that clothes had to been transferred manually between the wash tub and the spin drier.

Clothing

Because buildings were not well heated we wore thick clothing and several layers. In the winter we changed into thermal underwear and flannelette winter pyjamas. We wore heavy suiting, waistcoats, thick woollen socks, and had heavy overcoats.

There was no clothing just for leisure. We wore school clothes most of the time. Socks were darned, frayed shirt collars and cuffs were turned. For women dresses were often made at home using paper patterns.

Transport

Bicycles, buses and trains were the main means of transport. It was only the better off who had cars. We had no car. The few neighbours who had cars always kept them in garages. We never saw cars parked in our road. Consequently it was safe for children to play in the streets and on the road and to walk to school and shops unaccompanied. If you had a car parking was no problem and people expected to drive from shop to shop and park outside.

My father worked in London and walked to the tube every day – 20 mins each way.  Primary school children walked to school – secondary school children went by bus.  

Shopping

My mother walked to the shops – 20 minutes each way. She could not carry very much and we had no fridge, so therefore went almost every day. Milk was delivered daily by a horse-drawn milk cart. As we had no fridge in the hot summer milk had to be scalded to prevent it going off. Father worked Saturday mornings and arriving back from London in the early afternoon he then went with mother to do the heavy shopping she could not handle.

We had food that was in season and choice was limited – for example we would have salads only in the summer. A common content of our Xmas stockings was an orange! Imagine a child’s reaction to that these days.

Holidays

On Bank Holidays we might go out into the country by bus, to London to the Zoo by tube or to the South Coast or Southend by train or coach. Our annual holiday would be by train to a boarding house at a South Coast seaside resort. We spent most days on the beach with a few coach trips. My parents never travelled abroad or flew in a plane.

To illustrate the cost of travel, in 1958 my wife went to Greece for a month on a £50 scholarship by train and ferry (equivalent to around £1000 in today’s values). At that time the return air fare to Athens was £100 or around £2000 in today’s terms. So flying was only for the very well off.

Travel by train and ship has the merit of being less stressful than air travel. On my National service I went to Cyprus by troop ship which took a week. As far as I was concerned this was a pleasant break free of military duties.

The England touring test team would leave for, say, Australia, at the end of the summer, taking a couple of weeks to sail there. They would spend the winter playing cricket there and return in time for the next season in UK. Now test cricketers play many other countries in a period of a few weeks and unsurprisingly suffer fitness and stress – related problems.

Entertainment

For home entertainment we had the radio. There were two BBC programmes – The Home Service and the Light Programme – roughly BBC4 and BBC2.

My mother inherited some money in 1951 so we could afford to buy a TV by 1953 for the Coronation. There was one channel and limited viewing hours. My mother’s key requirement was that the set should have doors to cover the screen when not in use. The cost was £100 -about £2000 now. Many people rented their TV – as they were quite unreliable this was an advantage as you did not have to pay for repairs.

Cinema was very popular. There was a different film each week and there were queues to get in.

For those whose entertainment was reading there were good local public libraries and Boots the Chemist had subscription libraries above their shops. If you paid a B subscription you could only borrow the older books. The A subscription allowed you to borrow the latest publications

Today by comparison

Today we have central heating on all the time and a comfortable temperature in every room. We wear lighter clothing which we change very often. Automatic washing machines make laundry easy. Fridges and freezers mean we don’t have to shop so often and can keep a varied supply of food.

Personal car ownership means convenient transport, though whereas in my youth it was often a casual luxury now it has become a necessity for transport to work.

Cheap air travel means that we can travel abroad easily, going hundreds of miles for a weekend break.

Potentially this affluence makes for a more comfortable and more stimulating life.

But the down side is the consequent road congestion and local pollution from cars. Internationally there are devastating oil spills. Globally we have ozone layer depletion caused by the refrigerants from fridges and freezers and global warming form the increase usage of fossil fuels.

With cheap travel we should have more time for leisure, but people now travel miles to work and work long hours in order to fund their life style.

The aviation industry has resulted in high levels of aircraft noise and atmospheric pollution. And air travel in itself is no longer enjoyable with crowded airports and crowded destinations.

The fundamental change from the 1950s is that now we each have access to a much greater amount of cheap energy.

In the past a rich family would have servants to do the arduous tasks of cleaning, cooking, gardening and looking after transport requirements – horses and carriages or the Rolls Royce. Now we each have machines to do the tedious tasks for us – the dishwasher is our scullery maid, the washing machine our laundry maid, the gas boiler our boilerman.

We also have access to new material resources and new technologies, but this is only possible by the use of energy. So it comes back to energy and even those of us with modest financial resources use amounts of energy that once only the seriously rich had available to them. No wonder our fuel resources are diminishing so rapidly and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses such a threat.

The dilemma is – how do we achieve a ‘‘simpler” style of living without going back to the drudgery and limited horizons of the past.

Between this and some delicious green cup cakes, we all visioned into the future and brainstormed on subjects such as energy, food, transport, and water, in an effort to come up with ideas and plans for how we can make our town more sustainable over the coming years. The plan we came up with is a work in progress and will be posted on the website in the near future for everyone to comment on and add to. See also Toni Lambell’s notes which are well worth reading.

The Surrey Waste Partnership (Surrey County Council working together with the 11 district and borough councils in the county) is offering home composting bins at fantastic prices, starting from £14.00 (RRP £39.00).

Did you know 1/3 of your household waste could be used for composting?

Compost recipe: Kitchen waste includes:
 Cereal packets and egg boxes
 Fruit scraps, vegetable peelings and salad leaves
 Tea bags and coffee grounds
 Vacuum bag contents
 Vegetarian pet bedding

Garden waste includes:
 Old flowers and nettles
 Wood chippings and straw
 Twigs and dried leaves

Mix both kitchen and garden waste together, and over a 9-12 month period, you will have compost.

Benefits:
Saves you money:
 By not having to buy compost.
 Because it is organic and reduces the need for other garden products.

Boost your garden by:
 Keep plants healthy.
 Feeding your lawn and enriching borders.
 Nourishing flowerbeds and vegetable patches

Helps our environment:
 Because home made compost produces ‘peat-free’ compost. This eradicates the need to buy peat products, which have been commercially sourced and extracted from peat bogs, resulting in the release of stored carbon from the bogs.
 By putting less household waste out for collection, less energy is required as there are fewer vehicle movements.

Composting at home is the easiest way to recycle your waste because you can do it at home, in your own time. It takes little space and effort, and it’s so rewarding. Once you start, you’ll be surprised to see just how much the waste in your kitchen bin and garden bin reduces by – simply by putting suitable waste items into the compost bin instead.

To buy a bin or to dig up more advice on how to turn your table scraps and garden waste into compost, visit www.surreycc.gov.uk/getcomposting or call 0844 571 4444.

* The Surrey Waste Partnership is made up of Surrey County Council and the 11 district and borough councils in the county to manage Surrey’s waste in the most efficient, economic and sustainable way possible.

Buy Locally
Sell Locally
Employ Locally
Do recycling.

Fanny explained that one thing that goes well usually presents two more problems to overcome. She noted farming is very political – Fanny’s Farm Shop will never beat the supermarkets and suppliers. She asked if we really know where the food on our plate comes from? And what is ‘local’? To some suppliers this could mean production up to 35 miles away. This prompted discussion around the lack of an abattoir in the area, causing unnecessary distress to animals. Fanny doesn’t sell anything that is not local. Calabrese and chocolate cakes are the best sellers.

“Do you know where the food on your plate comes from? We should challenge claims about ‘local food’ and ‘organic eggs.” Fanny Maiklem

Health and safety is a big issue for the shop, as is trading standards and hygiene. Three samples are taken from each food item as part of a stringent regime of environmental control. Regulations prevent giving livestock leftover food.

As well as her daughter working in the shop, Fanny explained she provides local employment and added “staff with special needs are a pleasure to have.”

Some of the products sold at Fanny’s Farm Shop, and their local sources:

Watercress                             Gomshall
Chocolate cake                       Loseley, Guildford
Oak-smoked bacon                Chobham
Owlett apple juice                   Kent
Spinach                                   Milford, Godalming
Milk                                          Leigh
Bread and scones                  Down’s Bakery
Butter and ‘parmesan’            Bookham, Hickstead
Eggs                                        Fanny’s Farm’s own.

New suppliers contact Fanny regularly, on the basis of the reputation of the Farm Shop. Fanny noted with sadness there is only one milking herd in the area now, at Leigh, where once there were six. The shop stocks more varieties of marmalade than Fortnum and Masons, and the annual marmalade competition attracts 100 entries. Fanny’s own marmalade recipe is a closely guarded secret. Further stock that comes from the farm includes honey from eight beehives, and eggs. The farm also has a small vineyard and cuts its own willow. Fanny would like to see more local land given over to producing  food and added…“Redhill Rec should be turned over to chickens!”

So what next for this local empire? Fanny has been trying to obtain a license to hold wedding ceremonies at the Farm, but this is proving the point of one step forward two steps back. The accessibility of the tree house is proving a stumbling block for obtaining a license, and Fanny has not been able to resolve her application successfully with the relevant bodies. This is clearly a temporary blockage to moving forward however, and Fanny says “to have a bride come in would be so exciting for us”. Fanny concluded her stimulating talk by adding: “the best is yet to come”.