Boxing clever for your weekly veg

Nothing unusual about this, you might think, except that the fire station in question is in a small street in Stoke Newington and some of the contents of the box are grown locally, in the heart of London. Long pays £50 a month to belong to Growing Communities and she's been a member for a couple of years.

Stoke Newington's Growing Communities was the brainchild of Julie Brown. Fourteen years ago she set up a small local scheme with a group of 30 friends. Every month they each handed over £70 and Brown bought veg from a farm in Bucks and transported it to Camden, where it was divvied up between the members. "The money was like an investment in the farm — but I wanted it to be about more than just one farm."

When she moved to Stoke Newington in 1996 she started a local box scheme out of her garage, working with farmers in or close to London and with Langridges, an organic wholesaler in Covent Garden Market which could supply fruit (and occasionally vegetables) all year round.

The salad is all grown locally and Brown took me to see a thriving garden in Allens Gardens, one of three sites where salad crops are grown commercially for the boxes and the weekly Stoke Newington Farmers' market (which Growing Communities runs). Five per cent of the contents of the boxes come from inside the city (salads and leafy veg), 17.5 per cent from peri-urban farms and 35 per cent from within 100 miles of London. She's worked out a grid system, so that the most perishable items travel the least distance.

Brown is a passionate believer in changing our food systems which she says are vulnerable, wasteful and unhealthy. "Oil, on which we depend for our food, won't last for ever and will get increasingly expensive. Our health is suffering from processed food. I want to use community-led trading as a practical way to change from a system which is damaging to one that is more sustainable." That means supporting small farmers, generating income for local food-based jobs, growing food in urban areas and supplying local communities with healthy, seasonal and delicious food.

And it's working. Growing Communities now has 600 members and employs 22 people full- or part-time. There are seven pick-up points around the area and Richenda Wilson, who has been with the project since its inception, delivers them in Maisie, an electric milk float with a pair of horns on the front and black splodges all over her paintwork. Maisie travels at around 8mph and all the pick-ups are within three miles of each other.

The business has been self-sufficient since 2005 and now Brown is concentrating on replicating the community-led scheme in other parts of the city and the rest of the UK.

As far as I know, Brown's business is the only inner-city box scheme in the world. It's a fantastic enterprise: in addition to providing fresh, seasonal vegetables, Growing Communities is also a neighbourhood focal point: cookery demos, the farmers' market, lessons in how to grow veg and the community spirit generated by belonging to the scheme are just some of its benefits. The fact that she has also created jobs in a tough market gives real meaning to that much over-used word "sustainability".
www.growingcommunities.org