Morning:
9°c
There are few places I would rather be than up a tree.
It is finding a reason to be up a tree which is tricky — and I found one on Sunday in the garden of my friend Robin Grey, author of the blog Hackney Permaculture(www.hackneypermaculture.org.uk), which details the joys and travails of creating a small farm in his backyard.
Robin has persuaded his next-door neighbour to knock down their shared fence and collaborate on a permaculture plot. Where once there was a slab of concrete, now there are salad beds, raspberry bushes, runner bean poles and a pond. Amazingly, his landlord doesn't mind, which shouldn't be amazing, but is.
He has performed all this with help from local co-operatives such as Growing Communities, a volunteer-run open farm in Stoke Newington, and initiatives like “Seedy Sunday” — not a sabbath of debauchery, but a regular plant swap on London Fields.
The idea is that pooling resources is the best way of tilting food production towards self-sufficiency. Whereas gardening for the last generation was a private business, for the younger generation it is a gently radical, communal activity.
Today, a knowledgeable local named Ken has dropped by to plant willow and perform surgery on a troublesome elder (tree, that is, not someone's gran). Why toil on a stranger's private garden? Well, Ken has no patch of his own and a day's digging in the sun is reward in itself.
To compound his environment-alism, Robin is a vegan (I try not to hold it against him), which is problematic in a British climate. The sources of protein that a vegan relies on, such as soya beans, must be imported from far-flung corners of the world which, you can imagine, is the sort of thing that exercises the vegan greatly.
A solution to this is “leaf-curd”, a protein-rich, tofu-like substance extracted from leaves. According to an evangelical document we found on Google, it is the food of the future: cheap, versatile and amazingly nutritious. It can be made from almost any young leaf — including those of the voracious lime tree in Robin's garden, which was all the excuse I needed to scale the thing.
We should all spend more time up trees. Not only does it make you feel like Ray Mears, it is educative — at last I established that the lime tree has nothing whatesoever to do with limes — and therapeutic.
As for the “leafu” — the washed, liquidised and strained leaves yielded a bowl of mulch (superior fertiliser) and around 200ml of potent green liquid. When boiled, the nutrients in this solidified into a substance we stir-fried with purple sprouting broccoli and noodles.
It was not revolting — and that felt like a good day's work.
