Andrew Boardman is pottering about in his shed, like a mad professor with a Lancashire accent. He has lined up a row of test tubes containg old chip oil in varying stages of decomposition. Andrew, 42, is trying to find the most efficient way of recycling the oil into car fuel.
This former council gardener is a volunteer with the Bolton Gathering of Organic Growers (Gog), a green collective of individuals and groups dedicated to growing their own healthy produce. And the fuel that Andrew produces powers Gog’s van, a former Parcelforce vehicle, which volunteers are planning to fill with organic fruit and vegetables grown on their own allotments. The van will call at school playgrounds to offer free healthy alternatives to tuckshop sweets.
This is the latest project spearheaded by Alan Brown, 42, a health improvement specialist working for Bolton Primary Care Trust (PCT), who this week jointly took the prize for the Local Food Initiative of the Year, sponsored by the Soil Association and Highland Spring Natural Mineral Water. Under the scheme, Alan works with Gog and other groups to help individuals to find land to grow on — often unused land and derelict allotments — to organise training in organic growing and help with funding applications. The produce grown is not only distributed to schools; the unemployed, asylum- seekers and refugees also get free fruit and veg.
What the Soil Association judges picked up on was the way that each project that Alan oversees is driven by the needs and ideas of more than 100 volunteers, who are themselves mainly refugees, asylum-seekers and people from other hard- to-reach groups, such as teenagers who have been excluded from school.
“I think it was the ordinariness of the project that made it extraordinary,” says Lynda Brown, a food writer, organic campaigner and a judge of the Soil Association Awards. “It really was a totally inspirational example of a grass-roots movement that is coming from local people and not being handed down to them from on high.”
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Alan, through Bolton PCT, and with help from volunteers from Gog, co-ordinates a variety of healthy eating initiatives: community cafés, organic kitchen gardens in 13 schools, and cookery classes for young men. “The Kurdish kids work in fast-food shops, then come over and cook healthy stuff with us,” he says. “They were wary at first but when I had a go, they saw that it was OK for a bloke to cook, and got into it.”
Alan’s initial remit with the PCT was to introduce the Government’s Five-A-Day scheme, which encourages us all to eat five portions of fruit or vegetable a day. But his interest in growing and eating healthy food goes much deeper. His dream is to obtain a large plot of land in Bolton where food can be grown and sold, like a proper market garden.
At the Haslam Park allotments, where there are three community plots, Marie-Louise, 43, an asylum-seeker from Burundi, is wielding a right-angled hoe with tremendous force. “We call this an African hoe now,” she explains. “It’s what we would use in Africa but most people here hadn’t seen one before. It’s so much better at breaking up the soil, as you can see, so we managed to get hold of them to use here.”
Marie-Louise, who has two teenage daughters, was a French teacher in Burundi. She had little experience of growing her own food. “But when I came here, in June 2003, it was awful,” she says. “I realised that I had to do something. You go mad just sitting in the house, reading the latest letter from the Home Office, crying. Being here allows you to think, gives you space and people to share your troubles with. I started working as a volunteer with various groups, and met Malcolm and Jessie, who are from Zimbabwe. Together, we came up with the idea to get this plot going with the support of Gog. We grow the food; what we don’t eat ourselves we give away to those who can’t work.”
Her fellow volunteers include several Congolese people, a woman with Ukrainian/Israeli nationality, young Iraqis and Phil, an IT specialist who likes gardening. Other volunteers include Gulcan Mizra, who came to Bolton from Turkey to marry a local man, and Roy and Kathleen Swannick, Bolton-born-and bred, the wise elders of the group. “We’ve been doing this since the Second World War,” says Kathleen, 86. “It was Dig For Victory then.” Roy, 80, who had a distinguished career in park maintenance and horticulture, says that in return for his advice, some of the lads from the allotment come and dig over his garden at home because he can no longer manage it himself.
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Teamwork is the key to being a produce gardener. “People turn up and do what they can,” says Kath Baron, a project worker and Andrew Boardman’s partner. “We understand that sometimes their commitments mean that they can’t come. But there’s always somebody around to step in and help out.”
The Haslam Park group grow potatoes, carrots, cabbage, sweetcorn, pumpkins, rhubarb, tomatoes, strawberries, beetroot . . . There are plans to introduce Japanese vegetables and salad crops. Yet it seems a fairly conservative selection, given the range of nationalities that toils here and the exotic species with which they must be familiar.
“You’ve got to think about the soil and what will thrive,” says Marie-Louise. “Although, look over there at the amaranth grain. That’s from Africa but it’s doing really well. You can get it in healthfood shops, but it costs a lot. We use the leaves like spinach back home.”
“And we use all these vegetables in traditional Turkish cooking,” calls out Gulcan, 31, who is pulling up new potatoes. Point to a vegetable, and will give you a recipe for it. Runner beans? “Slice them with onions and tomatoes, cook them with salt in their own water, add black pepper,” she says. “We call it fasulye.”
Red cabbage? “Slice and chop thinly. Mix in vinegar, salt, oil and lemons. You can also add peeled garlic. Put it a container, and the following day, the cabbage will have absorbed all the juices. It’s crunchy and soft at the same time.”
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Gulcan jokes that her husband, who works as a painter and decorator, doesn’t get involved because he hates worms. For her though, with no family of her own in Britain, this allotment has provided solace and support, as well as plentiful healthy food. “When I had my daughter Zaynab, now 2, I wanted her to eat the best food possible,” she says. “I used to shop in the market, but it can’t be healthier than this. We pick it, and take it straight home to cook it.”
“There’s all that war and fighting in the world,” says Kathleen, sitting on a bench with a cup of tea, as little Zaynab toddles after nine-year-olds Joanne and Edwin, from Zimbabwe and Bolton respectively. “Yet look here, it’s so quiet, so peaceful. You can’t even begin to imagine why all the bloodshed happens.” Food then, for the mind, as well as for the body.
Getting your own allotment