Village Greens

The "storm in a teacup" meeting at Lewes Town Hall last week focussed on the urgent need to find down to earth ways of ensuring local food security. Encouraging the growth of many small scale "village greens" with local people finding their own creative solutions was enthusiastically discussed. This could work along the same lines as the "Artwave" open house model, individuals and groups being supported through "Villagegreen" publicity and events as they transform their spaces: gardens, streets, market halls and village greens on a weekly basis to sell locally made food and produce.

Regular small local markets would encourage broader local resilience as people got to know their neighbours: learning to grow, preserve and make in different ways, valuing seasonal healthy food, encouraging local growing and swapping of surpluses, reducing transport and packaging, encouraging more recycling, promoting healthier eating and other social and health benefits, developing new skills could help to inspire start up businesses, creating a network of new local producers and significantly adding to the amount of local food available for local consumption.

This would be a low carbon community effort at very little cost to LDC encouraging the entire Lewes District to take responsibility for making a start at feeding itself! Any comments and suggestions would be very welcome here....