Transition Town Tooting

Category: Foodival

Annual event of sharing locally grown food cooked by local chefs and restaurants.

  • Time to celebrate!


    October is our six-month anniversary as your Pips!

    As well as marking our half birthday, it’s a chance to catch a breath after the huge successes of the Tooting Twirl pop-up village green, our 10th annual Foodival sustainable food festival and countless other brilliant events this year.

    October’s meeting is about celebrating, checking in and changing things up

    We have a working list of items to discuss and make decisions on but there will also be the chance to relax after the formal stuff, with some making activities, drinks and chat.

    TTT is an exciting group with limitless potential and we want you to play a part in our future plans, so come along to our open meeting and find out how you can get involved.

    Tuesday 10th October
    7:30pm
    The Wine Room
    The Trafalgar Arms
    148-156 Tooting High Street, SW17 0RT

    We really hope to see you on the 10th!

    Jeni (co-chair), Sharon (co-chair) and Eleanor (secretary)

  • A great Tenth Tooting Foodival!

    Well that was fun! 
    What a great event the 10th Foodival proved to be.  Using Hereward Road beside Mushkil Aasaan gave the event a really good flow.  Outside, Volker manfully orchestrated the Big Feast, feeding the masses with sustainable locally grown fruit and vegetables, serenaded by the different artists on the Sound Lounge stage.  Bees drew the crowds to Richard’s camper van, while local resident Corinne painted faces, punters supped Kombucha from Thirsty House, sampled Debbie’s jams or discovered Wandsworth Oasis, Sutton Community Farm & Wandsworth Food Partnership.

    The Soap Box was a popular new addtion, providing an instant stage for environmental thinking while inside on the Green Stage we heard about propagating, insects and compost!  Jeni’s Crafts and the YUM-JAM kept kids young and old busy in the Mushkil Aasaan hall and in Hereward Rd.

    Thank you so much to everyone who contributed to making this a great event, especially our fabulous growers without whom there would be no Big Feast or Top Tooting Cook Competition.  More thank yous, reports and pictures to follow, but first I need a lie down!

     

  • Guide to Foodival 2017

    So what’s happening at this year’s Foodival?  Hopefully you’ve been keeping up with our recent blog posts and will have an idea, but for a handy print out or download version here’s our plan of the events.  It’s not set in stone, some of the timings may move a little, don’t worry just come along and see what takes your fancy.

    To make Foodival happen we really need your fruit and vegetable donations tomorrow night!  It’s this lovely produce that we use to cook up the communal Big Feast and that anyone can take to enter the Top Tooting Cook Competition.

    We are delighted to have the Sound Lounge curating the music stage this year, have loads of activities for the kids, talks on the Green Stage and the Soap Box as well as some great stalls and Arts & Crafts.

    We are hoping that the 10th Foodival will be great fun.  Come and particpate in any way you like!  It all starts Friday evening from 5pm.

  • Ready Steady GROW! for the 10th Tooting Foodival

    The Tooting Foodival celebrates local growing, cooking and eating together. It’s based on what people locally grow and donate – so we can all admire Tooting’s skills and productivity. Plus we can offer super ingredients to the Top Tooting Cook contest and the chefs’ delicious demonstrations. More info here.

    Sowing radishes
    Radishes harvested just 4 weeks later

    There’s still time to grow from scratch so you can donate to the Foodival on Saturday Sept 16th. It’s about sharing the love rather than growing big quantities. We’re  delighted by the diversity of what’s donated
    every year!

    Starting now, what can you sow, grow and harvest for the Foodival?

    If you can get sowing by the end of July, you could harvest these by mid-September:

    • Rocket
    • Coriander
    • mixed cutting Lettuces
    • Mustard Greens
    • Cima di Rapa (that’s turnip tops)
    •  And more – do share your suggestions.
    Rocket
    White turnips


    Alfalfa spouts, 5 days from starting

    Much closer to the Foodival date:
    > you could start Radishes as late as mid August
    > you could start Sprouting Seeds just a week before (here’s our handy guide)
    > you could sow Cress just a few days before

    Cress, 3 days from sowing

     Where can you grow?

    • In your own garden or allotment
    • In containers on a terrace, balcony or windowsill
    • At a nearby community garden

    Even if you’re a beginner, why not give it a go?

    Expert or newbie, everyone is included in our annual amazing ‘I Grew This’ celebratory Foodival poster:

    If you would like to ask questions or get advice, or come and grow from scratch with us at Tooting Comunity Garden – all welcome on Sundays and Wednesdays, 5 North Drive SW16 1RN. Check for updates on opening on our facebook page.

    NB there’s a highly-recommended session on container gardening by our friend Mark Ridsdill-Smith and more at the London Permaculture Festival on Sunday 30th July – see you there.

  • Foodival Menu

    For the 10th Foodival on September 16th we need lovely local growers to help us deliver this free menu to the streets of Tooting:

    Starter: Pakoras : Onions, cauliflower, courgette, spinach 

    Main Course: Vegetable Stew : Onions, carrots, potatoes, turnips, peas and any other veg including tomatoes, garlic, herbs etc.

    Dessert: Fruit Crumble : Any soft fruit – apples, pears, plums, berries 

    Are you growing any of these? Can you help?

    Some home grown donations from 2015

    For details on the Foodival and how to get involved growing, cooking, eating or celebrating please visit THE FOODIVAL BLOG

  • Join the 10th Foodival This September

    Tooting Foodival is back this autumn.  What are you growing now that could be cooked up in 3 months time?  
    On Saturday 16th September we’ll be celebrating the range of low food mile food that can be grown in and around SW17.  Come along and join in, in whatever capacity you like.  We guarantee it will be FUN!

    We Need Local Vegetable & Fruit Growers
    And We Need Local Cooks!
    Could It Be YOU? 


    For more information or to get involved please email transitiontowntooting@gmail.com

    Full PRESS RELEASE HERE

  • Vegetanuary

    Chuck’s Kale

    So some of us went vegetarian for the month of January and, for me, it proved surprisingly fun to try an alternative, more mindful way of feeding myself. 80 people shared experiences and recipes on the Vegetanuary facebook group and a celebratory feast was held at Vegan Express last week. 

    Vegan Express Celebration
    Dipa’s vegetable pastilla with feta

    It would be great to try this again, maybe even risking Veganuary or Veganpril and I am sure there must be a recipe collection in here somewhere???  It’s also a great way to kick off thinking about the 10th Foodival later this year.  

    Well done Richard for organising this inspriring initiative and thanks to everyone who or joined in. Not sure I’ll ever salivate over a bacon sandwich in quite the same way again!

  • Tooting Foodival Wins Mayor’s Sunshine Award

    Tooting Foodival 2015 today received an inaugural Grow Wandsworth Award from Mayor of Wandsworth, Nicola Nardelli, who launched the awards to encourage people and organisations who grow healthy, fresh, local food in Community Food Projects.

    With Mayor Nicola at Wandsworth Town Hall

    At a reception in the Mayor’s Parlour at the Town Hall, including very beautiful cakes, Foodival won the “Sunshine Award” for “celebrating the ways people have brought a bit of sunshine into the lives of others through community growing”! We do our best!

    Back in September the Mayor experienced the myriad food related activities Samaj Hall, including some prize winning vegetables and bananas (below)!

    Mayor Nicola Nardelli with David & Mal at Foodival 2015

    We are delighted to receive this award and it was really interesting to meet people from the other award-winning community groups including friends from SHARE Community and Wendelsworth Community Garden as well as new contacts who we hope to collaborate with in the future.

    For anyone interested in getting involved in Foodival 2016, the first planning meeting will be at the King’s Head in Upper Tooting Road, Tooting Bec, on this Thursday evening (Feb 4th) at 7pm.  All welcome to help us work out how we will create this year’s home grown sustainable food festival in Tooting.  If you have any ideas, skills, or just fancy being part of a fantastic (and now award-winning!) community project please do come along.

  • Foodival Stories

    Over on the Foodival blog we have been rounding up the stories from this year’s sustainable food event in Tooting.  There’s a Balham woman who grew bananas …

    Bananas grown by Susan in her Balham back garden

    And Sophie was the new face winning the prestige title of Top Tooting Cook 2015 with her beautiful culinary creation.

    Top Tooting Cook Sophie with her prize winning dish

    Pooja produced the tastiest dish according to the judges and Jenny Shand from SHARE Community Garden managed to cultivate the ugliest vegetable!  There’s more on the prize winners here. 

    Dave says: “Gimme Fracking not Solar!”

    Meanwhile, the Prime Minister tried to persuade us that subsidies for those dodgy polluting, diminishing, ever harder to reach fossil fuels are much more important than those for renewable technology.  Indeed this government plans to make community solar power generation unviable by slashing solar feed-in tariffs.  Sign the petition here to try to get this folly debated in Parliament.  Thanks to Furzedown Low Carbon Zone for highlighting this issue.

    Then there was the mysterious Giant Pea spotted up and down Tooting High St and featured in this Wandsworth Guardian video. 

    Children show off the Ugly Vegetables – the red pepper was voted the winner!

    Keep an eye out for more stories from the Foodival, some great pictures and a video over the coming days.
    Meanwhile what did you think of this year’s Foodival?

  • Foodival 2015 Rocks!

    Thank you to every veg and fruit donor, every restaurant cook, every great musician, every ugly vegetable, every volunteer, stall holder, artist, sponsor and Top Tooting Cook who made Foodival 2015 a fantastic celebration of home grown food cooked by local cooks. So many great connections made in a melting pot of south London’s food community. A mountain of photos and video will be sifted and we will report back on who won what. 

    But it’s back to the real world of (non-Foodival, non-Transition) work for most of us this morning, unfortunately, so bear with us! Keep an eye out of the Foodival blog for more in the next few days …

    If you missed the action over the weekend, you can see what you missed in the PROGRAMME HERE

    Roll on Foodival 2016 (10th/11th September 2016)