Bramble Ramble
This was the first of the food group's two planned wild food walks during the summer. Roger Hutchinson, who went on the walk, put together the following write-up:
Organised by TL’s Food Group, we met at the truly lovely Kings Lock Tearooms on Aylestone Meadows on Sunday afternoon (10-08-2008) for a Wild Food forage led by Andy Brooks, a local well-known environmentalist and councillor for Glenfield Parish Council.
Gagging for the fruit at the locks
Andy led the group of 16 people of all ages along the towpath of the navigation and up onto the Great Central Way, then down onto the meadows, pausing to show what could be safely harvested for human consumption.
Andy Brooks leading the pack on Aylestone Meadows
We learnt that Aylestone Meadows consisted of land that has been systematically used to facilitate the route of public transport of the Great Central Railway and the dumping of vast quantities of the city’s power station ash from the Raw Dykes plant and polluted sewage waste from Beaumont Leys. It all sounds like a smelly waste land with moon like mounds of smoking slurry but no – due to the efforts of farsighted council officers in the 70’s and 80’s who saw cost effective ways of turning a potentially blighted spot into a huge haven for fauna and flora. The place now is a paradise with an abundance of many useful native plants with rabbits, foxes and deer (and we kept an eye out for the Aylestone Big Black Cat!).
Despite the abundance of blackberries the container remains empty
The endless blackberry bushes yielding countless juicy berries distracted and thus delayed the group from keeping their appointment to collect their cycles from the now closed tearooms. No worry, it was a wonderful event in many ways, that adds to the strength of the movement of Transition Leicester. Even the ever advancing rainclouds dumped their bounty on either side of the party for the duration of the forage!