Mind Your Edible Table Manners

The punters hadn't really arrived yet

Bleary-eyed I pitched up in Machynlleth at 8:30am on Saturday morning with a leaf salad, a cucumber and tomato salad and a few random vegetables for display purposes. The other volunteers, eager and less eager, rolled up in the next fifteen minutes but the object of our appointed gathering hadn't yet materialised. We kicked our heels for a few more minutes as the morning mist began to vanish with the warmth of the rising sun. Finally a truck appeared and its driver offered their apologies for the delay. It was bearing a huge and majestic Berber tent that was to be erected on the field by the town hall. We got to work.

The event was the Edible Mach Harvest Picnic, supported by the local veg bag scheme and their growers (including me!) An action-packed day lay ahead. Apple-bobbing, sack-race, pin-the-tail-on-the-carrot, workshops on making a willow structure and a DIY planter, a talk by Pam Warhust who is one of the founders of the Incredible Edible scheme in Todmorden, the creation of an “edible table” and a splendiferous banquet of a lunch, mostly from food grown locally.

Heave! with the central tent pole

We got the Berber tent up in good time

The edible table was not, I realised with slight disappointment, a table that you could actually eat. That would I suppose be ultimately counter-productive, tables being useful things that can be frequently re-used over the course of their usually long life. Instead it is a wooden picnic table, beautifully designed in this case with long benches on either side, with holes at regular intervals for apple trees and other edible plants to grow through. Picnickers in the not too distant future will be able at this table to supplement their own fare with apples they pick directly from above their heads. The idea comes from a similar edible table at Kew Gardens apparently.

The therapeutic Community Garden just a couple of hundred metres away was also holding its own celebration picnic in honour of having been awarded a “Green Flag” for their efforts, so people were drifting between the two, the hungriest of them timing it right to get two lunches. That garden is a beautiful spot where a variety of soft fruit and veg are grown, and a whole swathe of flowers to attract pollinating insects. A pond encourages more wildlife. Volunteers tend it a couple of days a week. We ate some of their cake.

It was a beaut of a day. The sun shone so sweetly, the wind was absent (no doubt elsewhere mucking up someone else's event), people came and sat in happy throngs or got involved in the games or the construction. We were inspired by Pam's re-telling of how Todmorden pioneered the concept of growing veg in public spaces for anyone to harvest and how that is now spreading across towns in the UK (including Machynlleth) and internationally. “Don't wait for permission” was one of the key themes. “Just do it” was another. Words of advice that are apt in many circumstances, I suspect, certainly ones that I decided to follow when I began my time off-grid and (arguably) paid off so far!

Making sloe jelly from my own sloes - I'm hoping it sets!