Low Carbon Cookbook at the Bungay Beehive Day - 15 July

At the recent Bee Cause meeting in Norwich, organised by Friends of the Earth, Bob Flowerdew declared: if you want to help bees eat organic food, don't give your money to the pharmaceutical companies. It's perhaps the most useful step you can take to help both honeybees and wild bees in their present decline. Protecting wild places and growing nectar and pollen plants your garden are great helps, but the main damage caused to pollinator populations is the high use of pesticides in commercial food production.

At the Low Carbon Cookbook we're organic to the max: recognising that it's not just eating for our own health and well-being that is important, but that by "voting with our forks" and eating plants grown without systemic insecticides we're also backing the millions of creatures who suffer colony and habitat loss as a result of industrial farming. 90% of our crop species depend on pollination and we face a tasteless and depressing food future, if the bees and other insects disappear.

At our next meeting we are converging for a picnic after the (Sustainable) Bungay Beehive Day, organised by the Transition group, Bungay Community Bees. We will be discussing the crucial relationship between bees and our food, and everyone is welcome to join us. Just bring a picnic dish and/or drink with you and a rug to sit on.

This is BCB's second annual day of talks, walks and workshops celebrating the honeybee, and this year will feature the film, Queen of the Sun, and a talk by Heidi Hermann from the Natural Beekeeping Trust. At 12.15 LCC's Mark Watson will be leading a Bee and Flower walk around Bungay's diverse green spaces and at 2pm Charlotte Du Cann will be discussing wild flowers and their relationship with bees, with excerpts from her new book 52 Flowers That Shook My World – A Radical Return to Earth. Full details of the day here.

Meet at the entrance to the Festival marquee, Castle Meadow, Bungay on 15 July at 5pm. For further info contact Charlotte Du Cann theseakaleproject@hotmail.co.uk

Images from BCB trip to High Ash Farm, Caister St Edmund, farmed by Chris Skinner for the benefit of wild plants and creatures (and us).

On the move with Norwich FarmShare - workday 28 July

FarmShare has set up a new Food Hub at Bicycle Links in the St.Mary's Works complex. Bicycle Links gives unemployed and disadvantaged people skills and work shop experience, refurbishes unwanted bikes and stops them going into the waste stream and encourages cycling as a sustainable means of transport.

We think it’s a great location and we’re delighted to be sharing a space with a social enterprise whose social and environmental aims match so well with ours. If you’re not a member of FarmShare but would like to come and meet us, see how the Harvest Share Day works and see Bicycle Links you’d be more than welcome any Thursday afternoon (after 4pm); the full address is Bicycle Links, 18 St. Mary's Works, Duke Street, NR3 1QA.

Over at the farm, which is entering the most abundant half of the year, volunteers from the Big Norwich Bat Project have been recording bats. They were delighted to identify 6 species including soprano pipistrelle, noctule and brown long eared bats.

FarmShare welcomes visitors and the Tierney, Christophe and the team love to see people up at the farm. There are regular opportunities to come and get involved or just have a walk round the land. The next workday will be Saturday July 28th but you can come and help with the harvest any Thursday morning or come down at other times by arrangement - email Tierney here:
grower@norwichfarmshare.co.uk.

Grapes Hill Community Garden Update - 29 July

Grapes Hill Community Garden is a mass of lush vegetation and colourful flowers as the wet spring continues.

Highlights of the garden in early June are the magnificent grass Stipa gigantea and patches of Sweet Rocket (Hesperis matronalis), lupins, various types of hardy Geranium and Salvia 'Mainacht'. There are the contrasting foliage shapes and colours of Hostas, golden Lemon Balm, Heucheras, Sage, Curry Plant (Helichrysum italicum), Marjoram and Mints.

As summer begins there will be yet more colour and the garden should be looking good for our First Birthday Party on Sunday 8th July, the day of the Norwich Lanes Fair. There will be food, a licensed bar, music and plant sales, from 3pm until 9pm.

The flowers and the wildflower meadow are doing their job of attracting insect life into the garden. We've just been told that the garden has won an award from Norfolk Biodiversity Partnership. We don't have more details yet, but it is good to know that the Grapes Hill Community Garden Group's work to create a haven for people and wildlife near Norwich city centre has been recognised.

Our raised bed tenants are beginning to harvest their vegetables, though it has not been the easiest of growing seasons so far, with lots of cold weather.

We continue to have garden tasks on Sunday afternoons (2pm - 4pm). Our dates for the summer are: 15th & 29th July and 5th & 19th August 2012.

For more information about the garden see our website and Facebook page.

Jeremy Bartlett.

Photos by Jeremy Bartlett

New Transition newspaper launched

This month the Transition Free Press, a new national newspaper, launched its preview edition. It's a blueprint of how the paper will look, and the kinds of subjects we aim to cover every quarter - news with comment and context, features and reviews.

As well as viewing it online, there will be printed copies that will be available at various events, including the Transition Network Conference in September 2012. Plus you can order copies by post (see bottom of page).

"Where are we going?" asks the editorial. "We’re heading for the future. We are not afraid to share our views, ask awkward questions, laugh or explore paths other papers don’t go down in order to get there. What we want is to capture the real-life experiences of people who are discussing and doing Transition, learning to share skills and resources, starting up social enterprises, thinking hard about alternative ways of organising the way we do energy and economics.

We’re looking at the small details in the big picture. We’re optimistic in the face of tough times. But we are also real. We’re real about the awesome challenges of peak oil and climate change and the economic collapse. We’re real about the hard work the projects featured in these pages take (including this paper!) We want to reflect that feet-on-the-ground reality, mixed with the cheerfulness that comes when you’re working with your fellows for a common purpose.

Most of all we want to connect the dots. Our old-style, fossil-fuelled culture works by separating out all the important subjects, by keeping everyone separated and alone. We want to connect people in Transition, connect campaigners and thinkers and people who never heard of energy descent or alternative currency, open up a dialogue, write another story."

To make future editions happen, we need your support too - in particular we hope you like it enough to want to have copies to give out in your community. Please fill in this short survey to give us an idea of your interest in distributing copies: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GZCKV97

Please get in touch if you would like to contribute or advertise or get involved in any way with future editions.

For editorial contact Charlotte Du Cann charlotteducann@transitionnetwork.org
For distribution contact Mike Grenville mgrenville@gmail.com

Order print copies with Paypal. Click here: 4 copies or 8 copies
Please contact Mike for prices for more copies.

Image for front story on alternative currency -Brixton pounds in action by Jonathan Goldberg; Climate impacts day in Texas from 350.org

Norfolk Incinerator Song

Video of the King's Lynn/Downham Market incinerator protest at County Hall last Friday, shot by William Alderson. Song by Nico and the Downham Market Underground (John Preston - Downham and Villages in Transition)