We’re proud to share where we reached when voting closed yesterday on the Gardens of Refuge campaign with CARAS.
Over 600 people supported the project online.
We believe we came THIRD, with over 6200 votes.
WHICH IS WONDERFUL!
Our formal ranking will be confirmed on 22nd Nov by Aviva & we’ll communicate wider after then.
If we’re in the top 4 in our project category, we go through to the next round – to a more familiar bid process.
By the way votes went from 3400 on Weds morning to 6200 by lunchtime yesterday!
Thanks for your votes, patience and energy in this period of repeated messages and nudges in every medium possible, dominating the TTT airwaves.
Normal service can soon be resumed on communicating the rest of TTT’s rolling projects.
Every vote really did count!
This week is the home straight for voting online for funding support for Gardens of Refuge at the Aviva Community Fund. It will come down to our tally of votes at the end of 18th November, and of course the other ‘Aviva projects’ are also doing a push this week.
Please vote by Friday 12:00 for Gardens of Refuge, and ask your family and friends to vote too. Together we can support this creative and forward-looking Tooting partnership project with the refugee and asylum-seeker community centred on the Tooting charity CARAS.
Every Vote Counts, and every vote is appreciated!
How to vote?
You have to register individually before you can vote. To register, please click here for the Aviva webpage
Then search for CARAS or Gardens of Refuge to vote!
Project Details:
Read the description of the project online here.
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| For the future: bulbs for 2017 |
You’ll see that the project is all about growing the therapeutic benefits of gardening plus greening the community we share in Tooting.
And it’s about building ways to enable refugees to share their own knowledge and skills locally.
Together we’ll imagine and create a more beautiful neighbourhood as a legacy for all.
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| Legacy: flourishing from 2015’s cuttings |
CARAS – with whom we have worked in depth for 18 months on Rooting in Tooting.
The Grange – a residential respite and permaculture centre in Norfolk who work with CARAS. Please see The Grange.
& Transition Town Tooting
Thank you so much for your support & please vote by 12:00 on 18th Nov!
This autumn TTT is delighted to be able to contribute to events to share our learning from Rooting in Tooting (our joint project with the refugee and asylum seeker community served by CARAS)
It’s brilliant to be meeting new people and groups, and sharing in different ways: thank you for the invitations!
We certainly don’t ‘have all the answers’ but we would like to join others in asking questions and sharing practice.
1 The Royal Horticultural Society OneRHS managers conference
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| Credit: RHS / Julian Weigall |
CARAS & TTT were honoured to be the only outside speakers at this event for 175 RHS managers. We had fascinating discussions about how the RHS can most effectively engage with community projects.
2 Team London Volunteer Awards 2016
TTT is thrilled to be on the awards shortlist in the Greening & Cleaning category of the Awards. We’ll be joining other voluntary groups for the ceremony. Here’s the Mayor’s tweet on Monday morning: @MayorofLondon @SadiqKhan will celebrate the capital’s volunteering heroes at tonight’s #TeamLdnAwards at City Hall.
3 Cause2Create: “where we find specific, targeted solutions to challenges posed by the refugee crisis”
We’re invited to Cause2Create’s ‘hack’ weekend. “We know we’re not going to solve the refugee crisis in one weekend, but we can explore some of the specific challenges and develop scalable and actionable solutions.”
4 International Volunteering Conference at City Hall, celebrating London as European Volunteering Capital 2016
CARAS & TTT are co-facilitating one of the conference workshops in December. Joining in with the Greek volunteering NGO Ethelon, the aim is to explore training and community engagement aspects of working well with refugees. What benefits do both refugees and communities experience when working together?
During the year we also:
Interesting learning about project management is that none of these events was specifically planned when we started out in spring 2015. In the project plan we agreed that we wanted to share learning, and then be ready for serendipity and emerging opportunity.
It was good luck and being flexible that we were able to link refugee Youth Club young people with Border Control, the concept garden at the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show
Rooting in Tooting has involved over 20 local individuals who freely gave their time and experience alongside CARAS staff and volunteers: thank you all!
We also want to say a big thank-you to two project funders:
Finally – you will have spotted that we now have a new project with refugees and asylum-seekers under development: a 3-way partnership called Gardens of Refuge.
We’re asking for public votes from our friends and supporters (and their friends!) for funding via the Aviva Community Fund.
All the details are here, and thank you so much if you can take the time to register and vote for the project!
We’re very excited about TTT’s ninth annual Tooting Foodival which is all about Celebrating Local Food Together as a Community.
We’re planning the details now – here’s a snapshot preview.
Plenty more information to come later on.
‘Local food plus local community’ is the weekend’s theme:
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| I Grew This! (Foodival 2015) |
Saturday 10th Sept activities run from from 1pm to 5pm and are based at Mushkil Aasaan, 222 Upper Tooting Road SW17 7EW.
On Saturday we welcome all local growers to share and donate some of their local produce – maybe a bag of potatoes, or a single chilli pepper…whatever you would like to share.
Mark where you’ve been growing on our Growing Tooting Map.
We’ll take your photo proudly holding your fruit or veg for our 2016 I Grew This! poster and we’ll display what’s shared.
Where will all this wonderful donated local produce go?
Top Tooting Cook!
First, donated produce goes to anyone who wants to enter our fun Top Tooting Cook event. Take some produce or recipes away (or cook with what you have grown at home), and bring back what you make on Sunday for the light-hearted judging and more at Mushkil Aasaan from 4 to 7pm.
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| The TTC hat – not the only prize you might win |
Show off your culinary skills using fruit and veg grown locally and you could win a prize… and the coveted title “Top Tooting Cook”!
Find out all about the competition here and get in touch with Belinda to enter.
For inspiration, look at these delicious dishes – sorrel soup, risotto with cavolo nero, fava bean toast with egg – cooked by visitors to the Tooting Community Garden, using produce picked that day!
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| Thanks Naomi, Charles and Janine. |
Soup Disco!
Second, local produce donated on Saturday will go to Sunday evening’s Soup Disco party from 7pm to 10pm in Tooting Market, 21-23 Tooting High Street SW17 0SN.
From 7pm, we will all starting chopping the veg to make our delicious Tooting soups for a shared meal. And throughout this collective cook-up, our top local DJ will be spinning the tunes so you can show off your dance skills as well as your kitchen skills.
Beginners welcome throughout… fabulous outfits very welcome!
Plus, some Graveney Gin and Unwined will also be open for business – it’s going to be a memorable night!
Other activities for all ages on Saturday at Mushkil Aasaan from 1pm to 5pm will include:
Celebrate reducing waste and having fun by displaying your Ugly Veg. Or as it’s called in the USA: Produce with Personality.
Learn about urban beekeeping, taste SW12 and SW17 honey and get close to bees. Local beekeeper Richard is bringing a demonstration hive of live bees. He can chat about bees & honey – and about sources of info for planting and gardening to encourage bees and other pollinators.
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| Sprouted teff seed |
Practice being a successful home farmer by sprouting seeds – easy and delicious. Fresh seeds sprouted at home only have to travel a few inches ‘from plot to plate’.
NO food miles!
Play our fun low carbon living games including exploring food’s footprint and much more.
Get hands-on and creative with crafts linked to food and the Soup Disco – all ages can come and enjoy making.
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| In the garden… |
Explore the local network of community gardens which can offer you fun, exercise, friendship, time outdoors in nature and a place to grow healthy local food.
Plus, you will pick up plenty of growing advice and encouragement to grow your own fresh food on window sill, a balcony or in a front garden.
Discuss the other local sustainability projects that Transition Tooting facilitates with many different partners, find out how to get involved – and we welcome your suggestions and new ideas.
All welcome to #Foodival2016!
Yesterday we officially opened the Dragon Bean bench at the Community Garden Summer Picnic!
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| Gentle finishing touches last week |
For the past twelve months Fio Adamson has been guiding a participatory sculpture project in the Community Garden.
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| About to cut the ribbon & unveil the bench |
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| Now, can Fio rest….? |
Working with many pieces of the American Oak felled on the Furzedown Rec, the Furzedown Oak Project was born.
Over this past year around 80 people of all ages have worked with Fio to imagine, draw, visualise, carry, carve and advise on what’s evolved into the Dragon Bean bench.
Our Summer Picnic celebrated the Dragon Bean and good company in the Garden: we had delicious food, made popcorn and cooked potatoes on a fire, enjoyed volcano kettle tea, picked brambles, weeded the leeks, painted beautiful signs for the vegetable plots…
Lots more picnic photos on the Community Garden facebook pages
We’re so lucky to have the use of the Community Garden land, loaned to us by Tooting charity Mushkil Aasaan. It means we can facilitate community projects like this and our outdoor learning with schools. Plus we can enjoy the Community Garden sessions with anyone who wishes to come, every Sunday.
We’ve opened the space on over 225 Sundays since 2011.
Why ‘Dragon Bean’? Come and have a look!
The sculpture-bench is ready to sit or lie on in the Tooting Community Garden on Sundays from 11:00 to 1:00 at 5 North Drive SW16 1RN.
We post any updates on our Facebook pages. All welcome!
In the final local growing sessions in Balham, Tooting and Wandsworth we celebrated progress and looked at what comes next now the programme is complete.
We discussed harvesting and preparing food (and bringing any surpluses to the Tooting Foodival), and asked about what the participants might need next in their growing journey.
Suggestions so far: ‘local gardeners’ question time’, a Facebook group, occasional meetings, visiting each others’ growing spaces.
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| Exploring the herb bed |
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| Fresh produce laid out on the Eatwell pie chart |
There’s been a second major part of Growing Tooting’s activities. As agreed with the Wandsworth Big Society Fund who gave us financial support for the whole programme, we also supported local gardeners with the development of growing spaces. We’ve been working with six gardens. Please see our blog post from March for more info.
The school Gardening Club has been encouraged and enthused by Mary, Barbara and Richard.
Finally – do get in touch with us at TTT to explore how to start or keep on Growing Tooting (and Balham and Wandsworth).
Thanks all for taking part!
– Chuck
On the 30th June CARAS Youth Club members travelled to the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show to help with the build of the Border Control Concept Garden. It was a fascinating visit – to see the TTT blog post, click here.
Now the garden is finished and open to the public. The Youth Club paid a second visit this week to see it.
In the past week there has been a lot of interest in Border Control. Although we don’t claim any responsibility we are thrilled…
The garden won an RHS Gold Medal, and also won the Award for the best of the ten Concept Gardens.
We’re proud because taking a very small part in the garden has helped us spread the word about the reality of refugees’ experiences and helped us be confident that our Rooting in Tooting project with CARAS is valuable. The visit has given fascinating experiences for Youth Club members as a group about encountering new aspects of Britain, and created and opportunity for them to explore and communicate their own responses.
The Evening Standard covered Border Control again yesterday, including an interview with one of the CARAS Youth Club members – you can read the article here
Finally, there are a few free tickets available for the Hampton Court Show, for tomorrow (Sunday) – the last day.
These tickets have to be collected in Tooting today, Saturday 9th July, before 4pm.
This is a very last minute-offer so excuse the rush – if you would like to have a ticket or two, email as soon as you can to TTT at transitiontowntooting@gmail.com and we will explain how to collect.
Go and visit Border Control in person!
In 2015 TTT helped facilitate a research project by the University of Westminster all about the impact of urban heatwaves – for the details please see past blog posts by clicking here on Urban Heat.
TTT worked with the researchers and with many local partners in Tooting: voluntary and community groups plus borough-level and statutory bodies.
The funder for this research project is The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and yesterday TTT took part in a workshop comparing the early research results of three JRF-funded projects.
Each of them explores the links between climate change and UK communities and households. Each aims to give new information to local and national policy makers.
Participants included national bodies such as Public Health England & Defra, & the Cabinet Office, local authorities and universities.
An overall view? That there are synergies of relationships between all the topics outlined below..and that communities with local knowledge and energy have an opportunity to get involved and contribute.
One project is looking at the impact of climate change on UK households’ cost of living between now and 2050.
A valuable prediction so far is that lower-income households will experience the most impact, on part because a larger percentage of their budgets goes on climate change-sensitive expenditure – for example food costs (negative impact because of UK and global events), or energy (a positive impact as winters will be warmer), or repairs after flooding (very negative impact if a low-income household has no insurance).
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| Workshopping in Tooting |
The second project looks at how to enable climate resilient communities.
The research area covered three towns and villages in a single large rural local authority that spans the Scottish Borders, and a main focus turned out to be the impact of local flooding which was taking place at the end of ’15 as the research groups were meeting.
Flooding is a known risk, is recognised and visible, and has a funding stream with tangible (sometimes debated) results…so gives a definite point of focus to rally around.
Local responses to flooding also led to valuing other aspects of community resilience such as the local ‘creative capital’ – the energy the community can generate to work together in new ways.
Anyone else reminded of ‘Tour de Tooting’ and ‘Rooting in Tooting’?
Thirdly, the Urban Heat project has worked across 3 diverse London boroughs: Tooting, Hounslow and Hackney. Like the Scottish research taking place amidst flooding in Hawick, one of our meetings took place on a day the temperature reached 30 degrees C – designated a risk by the heat health warning system.
Findings include that yes, voluntary groups are interested and understand the impact once they can explore it in depth. So do the borough and other bodies..however the way these two ‘slices’ of the local community can work together is not yet defined.
Heatwaves are not perceived in the same way as flooding – heatwaves seem to ‘just happen’ (in fact we may want some warmer weather), we soon forget them, we don’t realise the impact can be so serious, the responsibility for policy and communication is not so clear.
Yet in 2003 2,000 people in the UK died in heatwaves; a far greater number of tragic fatalities than in recent UK flooding.
We’ll share links to these research results when they are formally published.
Here’s the report from the seventh weekend of our Growing Tooting ‘grow your own food’ local fortnightly classes. We’ve been offering these in Balham, Tooting and Wandsworth since April.
The common themes this week have been exploring more ambitious planting schemes, visiting other local gardens, and looking at forest gardening.
So: here’s a group planting a ‘Three Sisters’ bed in Balham: 
That means establishing a bed with three complementary crops (sweet corn, beans, pumpkin) which combine well in terms of habit, shade needs and care. It’s a fascinating traditional native american method making good use of limited cultivated land.
The Tooting group visited the Tooting Community Garden
Here they are comparing our bread wheat with an experimental bed of teff, a ‘wonder grain’ from Ethiopia.
One of the Wandsworth groups
visited members’ allotments in King George’s Park.
That’s a nice scene!
This fortnight’s Seventh Growing Tooting Handout is available to everyone by clicking here.
The focus is Forest Gardening: as a development of the permaculture conversations in the 6th weekend of Growing Tooting. It’s a fascinating method where short-term crops are not planted, and the plot is managed to produce from perennial ground cover plants, bushes and trees.
That’s very different from the experience most of us have on our allotments or balconies!
Keeping up the theme of visiting inspiring gardens, a great place to experience a half-way house between growing in beds and developing wilder forest growing is at Spiralfields Community Garden, part of the wonderful Spitalfields City Farm in Tower Hamlets.
At Spiralfields they have dumped 60+ tons of soil in hillocks and valleys right on top of existing paving…and planted trees which will break through the concrete in time.
The whole space is a super-productive oasis right alongside the Eurostar tracks.
Visiting info for Spitalfields City Farm – click here.
One of the UK’s gurus of Forest Gardening is Martin Crawford.
He finds that with a mature forest garden, just a few day’s work per year produces a big proportion of his family’s food -though some of the crops are not very familiar. Info here.
Martin’s garden is just under a hectare (as it’s Euro 2016, that’s the size of two football pitches).
Many of us make plans of our planting beds; Martin has identified every tree on his site….!
He’s written a comprehensive guide and runs regular courses in Devon (see details online here).
Courses are highly recommended if you want to immerse yourself…
Always new things to explore in gardening!
– Charles
