Local food meeting 05/06/09

Transition Harborough help its first local food open meeting on Friday 5th June in the Angel Hotel to discuss projects that it would like to undertake and to harvest more ideas for projects from attendees as well as recruiting volunteers. The meeting was well attended with around 20 people donating their Friday evening to discuss food and how to make it work in Harborough. We did not cover all of the topics that we had hoped due to time restrictions but the ones we did cover were thoroughly explored.

The ‘Food buying group’ was discussed and a few innovations along the bulk buying lines were offered with nominated collection sites and individuals being responsible for one line of bulk items, for example Mark could hold Ecover products in bulk for refilling and another person a sack of rice to be divided up. Eleven people initially put their names down to participate in this project.

As we all know ‘Allotments’ and their provision are a very emotive subject and all of the new faces along this evening were hoping for a way to find land around Harborough upon which to grow food. Ruth Halberda updated us on where she had got to with the council and the Harborough & Bowdens charity sites. She had identified that there are many abandoned plots wit in the Logan street site and the Bowdens charity had promised to get them cleared and re-allocated, however allotmenteers on the site claimed that they had been told that a year ago.

Due to the high numbers on the waiting list it was decided that we would contact a number of land owners to see if we can arrange the provision of more allotments for the town and we would try to encourage anyone on the council and Bowdens waiting lists to contact us with their details.

The ‘Community Farm’ project was outlined for the benefit of the new faces and the Journalist from Stamford as well as the Fruit & nut tree planting that is planned for November. Abundance projects were also mentioned where the community collects unwanted fruit and distributes it to save it from waste, it was mentioned that we had discussed mapping fruit and nut trees around Harborough but are not sure what technologies would support this.

Here we ran out of time, so until the next meeting.

Darren