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?

FLCZ at Furzedown Fun Day

Nice picture of the Furzedown Low Carbon Zone stall at the Furzedown Festival on Saturday.

FLCZ Chair Giles Read (who took the photo, thanks Giles) said: "what a brilliant event The Furzedown Festival was.  The interest in the FLCZ stall exceeded all expectations, from people interested in investing to those wanting information on solar panels or just enjoying cycling for a song!" 

Competition Cakes

On that score it really is interesting to "cycle for a song" to see how much pedal power it requires, in my case 5 minutes cycling to put a "Man On The Moon" courtesy of REM.  However it's actually much harder to power the 100W light bulb.  Some of the children trying out the bike were fascinated at the connection between their effort and the generation of electricity. Thanks again to Eleanor for the loan of her cycle power machine which has been a great addition over the last two weekends.

Ecobuild 2014

This year's Ecobuild had plenty to catch the eye and ear.  I was particularly interested in the Resource section on reuse and the circular economy. Here's three projects which sounded good:

• The RSA's Great Recovery Project about how redesigning systems can help conserve valuable resources and minimise waste. 
  
• The London Re-use Network who give young people a chance to develop skills repairing unwanted household items which are then provided to those most in need, in social housing for example, at the same time saving more dumping in landfill. 
  
• Rentez-vous which enables women to rent fashion items from each other and from fashion houses rather than buying wardrobes full of things rarely to be worn.

Meanwhile a seminar we attended on Community Energy will definitely be helpful for the Furzedown Low Carbon Zone project.  As well as these highlights, Ecobuild as usual hosted the best in sustainable design, construction and renewable energy.  It's invariably an inspiring event to sample all the latest ideas and to gather useful information.             dt

Community Renewable Energy in Furzedown

We want to share this exciting news from the Furzedown Low Carbon Zone (FLCZ) AGM last week. There's no time like the present, and we have decided to take the plunge and try our hardest to establish a community renewable energy project in Furzedown.

What will that look like?

In outline we'll be supporting the generation of local power that should bring local benefits; probably a co-operative enterprise with a legacy for the future.  There are several models for this across the UK and abroad, and there is good local advice available: at the same time it is a pioneering project, and it will be challenging.

Much more information to come as we get going, and we welcome local participation, partners, and support. We have a diverse team who want to make this work. More contributors welcome!

We covered other topics too in the AGM, and the FLCZ aims to keep being active on accessible social, behavioural and technical projects that help demonstrate the value of low-carbon living, now.
Links: 2014 AGM minutes  For background: 2013 Annual Report.