Digging & Dreaming

Food, Memory and Place

The Mr Seel's Garden project I was involved in earlier in the year and which I am now documenting for my Permaculture Diploma was a dream project for me bringing together the themes of food, narrative and community. Looking particularly at the part that food plays in our relation to place and the people we share that place with.

This project took place in Liverpool which is a city with particualrly fascinating food heritage. In revisiting my notes to write the project up for my diploma I was reminded of the wonderful pictures that we had found as Mr Seel's Garden developed and thought that they were so lovely that it would be a shame not to share some of them here with you.

Cazneau Street Market

A cowkeeper outside their dairy in Central Liverpool - urban dairies were a unique feature of the urban food infrastructure in Liverpool

A potato hut in Everton

A Liverpool milkman

Joynson's Market Garden after it closed

Diploma Tutorial - Looking Back & Looking Forward

Last week as I began organising my planting and growing plans for the coming year I also took an hour out to have my first tutorial as part of my Permaculture Diploma. As I live in Manchester and my tutor, Hedvig Murray, lives down in Brighton this meant arranging time to hook up on Skype and spend an hour talking about where things are up to with my Diploma. Tutorials are an important part of the Diploma process as they are a great way of stepping back and considering where you are really up to with things and where you would like to head with them next.

I have to admit that before the tutorial I was a little apprehensive as life has been very busy for me so far this year meaning I was not sure how much progress I had actually made on my diploma. I knew I had been doing things (though not as much as I had wanted to!) but a lot of this doing had not been recorded meaning I was feeling a bit behind in the documentation aspect in particular.

We began the tutorial by talking about where I felt I was up to with things - this is where I outlined to Hedvig the things I have just shared with you in the previous paragraph! Despite the seeming setbacks, in talking to Hedvig, I realised that I was actually well on track with things and that it was just me documentation that had slipped a little. In order to start things moving forward with this we talked about different tactics that I could used to start getting my projects and ideas on to paper.

From my tutorial it became clear that my key learning so far had been:

• increased understanding of the Permaculture Design process and how it fits into my personal and professional practice.
• increased confidence in explaining what Permaculture means within my practice to other people, who may or may not know about Permaculture.
• developing my Action Learning Pathway.
• developing a design process that suits my work, and the predominantly non-landbased projects that I am working on.
• clarification of what my diploma guild was and how it would support my learning.

I also became clearer about the key objectives that I have for my diploma in the coming months:

• to research and develop ways that work for me of recording my work as I go along.
• to use my blog more as a way of documenting my learning and development.
• to complete the documentation of my first two designs and to allocate time to proper development of my third design - creating a eco garden for my friend Anne.

All in all my tutorial felt like a very positive experience and I am looking forward to putting the actions that I have identified into practice.

Memories of Mr Seel's Garden

If you are in Liverpool walking along Seel Street you may come across this plaque on the wall just around the corner from Liverpool ONE's Tesco Superstore. In the centre of this commercial centre it's hard to imagine that it was once a green and pleasant space but this plaque reveals that the area around Hanover street, including the land the Tesco now sits on, used to be full of market gardens.

Memories of Mr Seel's Garden is a collaboration between Transition Liverpool, Friends of Everton Park and the Friends of Sudley Estate, as well as academics from Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh. The main aim of the project is to explore how engaging local communities with the changing patterns of urban food production might contribute to current grassroots efforts within Liverpool to raise awareness around current food issues. The project team have been collecting examples of stories inspired by local food heritage since February 2012, wondering if knowing more about where we used to get our food from might inspire other radical ideas about where we could grow our food in the future.

I was lucky enough to meet Michelle Bastian who is one of the researchers working on the project and she asked if I would like to come on board for the final stage of the project to develop a performance sharing stories that have been gathered as part of the project as part of a final celebration event that will take place at The Bluecoat in Liverpool on the 27th January. I am delighted to be part of the project and also really excited to be able to use the process I am involved in as one of the projects for my diploma portfolio. It is great to be part of such a brilliant project which also allows me to put my permaculture design learning into practice within a real life context.  I will keep you updated as the project develops. And maybe some of you will be able to join us for the sharing on the 27th January 2013? Hope to see you there!