Join us to celebrate & learn about four of TTT's valued community partners at the Tooting Foodival

We're all looking forward to the FREE 11th Tooting Foodival on Saturday 15th September - for all the details of the Saturday community feast and more, scroll through our recent posts including our invitation to you to donate locally-grown vegetables and fruit, and about entering the Top Tooting Cook competition. 

The Foodival will be at Hereward Road and next door at 220 Upper Tooting Road, SW17 7EW from 11:00 to 5:00 on Saturday 15th.

We want to celebrate four community partners who are helping make the Foodival creative, relevant and anchored in our local community:

• Mushkil Aasaan
• London Sustainability Exchange
• Share Nurseries
• Think Outside

Mushkil Aasaan is a community-based care provider. The Foodival will be in their Hall on Upper Tooting Road and in Hereward Road right outside. Ever since TTT was established ten years ago, Mushkil Aasaan and the Project Director Naseem Aboobaker have been rock-solid friends and partners.
We've lost count of the number of times we have been able to meet or run sessions in their Hall! 
Mushkil Asaan gifts us the yearly use of the land where we run the 'all welcome' Tooting Community Garden, our weekly outdoor learning provision with Gatton School, and our Gardens of Sanctuary family days with refugees & asylum seekers from CARAS.


London Sustainability Exchange has been our partners in past activities on Air Quality and more. Throughout 2017 we worked together as LSx co-ordinated the Pollinator Paths Wandsworth Project which engaged 50+ home growing spaces via 4 local community gardens. LSx will be bringing Pollinator Paths 2018 - come along and learn to love insects!
You can do the pollinator recognition survey and sign up for further exciting involvement whatever your age or growing experience.


Share Nurseries is the social enterprise recently launched as part of Share Community.
Share Nurseries have supplied plants to us in many projects - all grown in Tooting with a tiny carbon footprint and a large amount of love, care and skill by Share's beneficiaries. 
Their plants will form 2 pop-up raised beds in Hereward Road, and the plants will be for sale later in the day on the 15th.



Think Outside is a local enterprise which runs and advises on outdoor learning workshops in schools, assists schools in raising funds for the re-development of outdoor spaces and leads gardening classes and related activities for the wider community.
Come and meet the Think Outside team: they are bringing some great activities from 11:00 until 2:00.
 

 

All welcome to come and learn about these enterprises and enjoy their activities at the Foodival on Saturday.

In another post we'll also celebrate the local people who are taking stands to sell their produce - there's lots to enjoy at the 2018 Foodival!

We invite you to share and celebrate your locally-grown vegetables and fruit at the Tooting Foodival on Saturday September 15th!

We're very excited to be hosting our eleventh annual Tooting Foodival community celebration of locally grown, cooked and enjoyed food on Saturday Sept 15th.

Traditionally we invite our friends and neighbours - and also complete strangers - to generously donate locally-grown fruit and vegetables they can spare. Please join in!

All grown locally and generously donated!

In 2017 500+ people feasted with us via the creativity of many volunteers and 4 chefs, cooking entirely local fruit and vegetables. It was a fantastic experience (more to share to celebrate the chefs).

2018 has been a much harder growing year than 2017, and despite that we hope that everyone's green fingers and generosity can be expressed in some donations - everything is appreciated however diverse or apparently humble. It's about the love of sharing rather than volume (though we do need some bulk as well!).

We celebrate the donors on our 'I Grew This' poster and on social media. Donated veg and fruit also provides the ingredients for our Top Tooting Cook Competition.

All the info in the series of posts here on this blog.

To donate produce, bring it along to Mushkil Aasaan at 220 Upper Tooting Road SW17 7EW on Friday evening 14th Sept between 6 & 8 pm, or on Sat 15th between 10 & 11 am. 

We do hope you can contribute - thanks so much.

And we look forward to seeing you at the Foodival! 

A fun event at the Tooting Foodival in a fortnight. Could you be 2018's Top Tooting Cook? Enter the competition today!

Could you be 2018's Top Tooting Cook?  

Enter the Competition Today!

Even more exciting than Bake Off: show us your vegetarian culinary skills using produce grown and sourced locally and you could win a prize at the Foodival on Saturday September 15th...
and the coveted overall title of "Top Tooting Cook"!



Cook something tasty and vegetarian to enter into the grand cooking fiesta at the 2018 Tooting Foodival!

The competition is open to anyone living, producing, growing or cooking in Tooting and the surrounding area. We supply (or you can use your own) locally-grown fruit and veg for you to cook up at home and then serve to our panel of hungry judges on Saturday Sept 15th.

There are four competition dish categories this year, and the winner in each will win a prize:

1. A dish made with Apples or Pears
2. A Savoury dish
3. Pudding / Dessert / Cake 
4. Pickles / Jam / Preserve / Jelly / Chutney

All entries will be judged on look, taste and how locally-grown the ingredients are. You can use 'pantry' items such as flour, sugar, spices but the more you use that's locally-grown, the higher your mark will be. We have had dishes that are 100% local ingredients...!

There will also be an overall Top Tooting Cook prize, which could be a dish from any category. Last year's overall TTC winner was a squash compote...what will happen in 2018?

This is Imira, 2017's Top Tooting Cook and her prizewinning dish.

 

When and Where:

• Collect free locally-grown fruit and veg at Mushkil Aasaan, 220 Upper Tooting Road SW17 7EY on Friday 14th Sept from 6:00 - 8:00 pm or on Saturday 15th Sept from 10:00 - 11:00 am

• Deliver your delicious vegetarian dish between 1:30 and 2:30 pm to the same venue on Saturday 15th. Please hand in a full recipe sheet for judging and for inclusion in our local recipe bank.

How to Enter:

Belinda is the firm and fair TTC organiser. Contact her by emailing transitiontowntooting@gmail.com to enter or ask any questions.

The TTC judging and audience tasting is always a great scene. Please enter for the fun or the challenge - and to just have a go.
We look forward to seeing you and your dish on the 15th!.

TTC entries in 2017

Invitation and generosity: locally-grown vegetables and fruit welcome for the Tooting Foodival!

Just like 'which came first, the hen or the egg?' to create the fresh local Big Feast on Saturday 15th and for dishes created by Top Tooting Cook competitors we'll need great fresh local ingredients.

We invite everyone to donate what you have grown locally!
In the Tooting Community Garden we're growing for the Foodival, other local gardens are growing to donate their produce, and many individuals always bring in their proudly-grown crops to share with us all - maybe simply a tomato or two grown on a balcony by a brand-new city gardener. It's about the gesture and the sharing more than about volume (though we did feed 500 people last year!)

There's such a diversity of fresh produce donated. So beautiful, so tasty, so surprising.

It's all about generosity and gifting so that everyone can enjoy celebrating local growing, cooking and eating on Saturday 15th Sept at the Foodival!

Here are some of the local people who donated in 2017. Also surprising - and involved and having fun.

All welcome to join in and donate anything you have grown locally! 
You can donate at Mushkil Aasaan, 220-222 Upper Tooting Road, SW17 7EW on: 
> Friday evening 14th Sept from 6:00 to 8:00pm
> Saturday 15th between 10:00 and 11:00am, when the Foodival kicks off!

Top Tooting Cook 2018 - all welcome to enter!

 

Top Tooting Cook, the Tooting Foodival's fun cooking competition is ably co-ordinated by 'firm but fair' Belinda. Using locally-grown fruit and vegetables which you can collect from us on 14th September, you make your dish overnight and then bring it to the competition at the Foodival on Saturday 15th. See the details of how to enter by clicking on Top Tooting Cook above this post.

In 2017 we had a record-breaking number of entries: do join in this year!
 

This is Imira, who won the overall award of Top Tooting Cook 2017 with her squash compote! It's a Brazilian recipe.

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

All 2017 competition dishes are in this photo - crying out to be tasted (some people had to be held back...) 

 

 

 

 

There was a wonderful variation of international cultures, ingredients, skills and why-not-have-a-go represented. So - how about entering the Top Tooting Cook competition this year? All welcome!

 

Here are some local pickles at a secret location - maybe you’ll see them again on Saturday September 15th at the Foodival!

Foodival Poster 2018

This year's Tooting Foodival poster celebrates the three activities for which Tooting's long running sustainable food festival is famous - growing, cooking and eating!  If you are a connaisseur of any of these activities we urge you to get involved in this year's festival either as a grower donating some home grown produce, a cook helping to produce tasty locally sourced meals for the masses, entering the Top Tooting Cook Competition, or as a taster of these wonderful dishes on the day.  Perhaps you could be all three?!!
 
If you interested in finding out more about Tooting Foodival 2018 EMAIL US or check out the links below:

Download poster here
Latest Press Release here
Stalls Application From here

Tooting Foodival 2018

South London's premier sustainable food festival will run this year on Saturday 15th September.  Yes Tooting Foodival will be back in the late summer for its 11th running to celebrate all that's good about locally grown produce.

You could be immortalised like these growers from 2017!

Expect the usual delights of a communal feast made from low food mile food, cooking competitions, crafting, growing, composting, activities for kids and of course music!

The Foodival team are now meeting regularly to plan this year's event.  It's fun and social and you can get involved in any way.  We are always open to including new ideas so if you fancy joining in, in any capacity, just EMAIL US to find out how!

"Shazifim yerakim, gojeh sabz, jarareng, erik, janarek...." Tooting Community Garden's plums

Did you try the sour plums at the Foodival?

'These sour plums are known as shazifim yerakim in Israel, gojeh sabz in Iran, jarareng in Lebanon, erik in Turkey, and janarek in Jordan.'

These plums were saved after pruning the Greengage trees that grow in the tooting community garden as part of a pruning workshop. They were not ripe for eating but nothing goes to waste so Charles experimented with pickling the plums. They were certainly delightful at the Foodival. Something Unique.

The pruning workshop was delivered by Ryan O'Kane from The Orchard Project and we were joined by people from other gardens that could benefit from advice on pruning fruit trees.

Once we knew which trees were remaining then we needed to prune them  to provide space for air and better light to help them be healthy trees. Ideally this would be a vase shape but our particular trees are grown from 'suckers' - that is a  self propagating system connected to the main tree.


While we all wanted to get going with the variety of exciting tools they had brought along it was important that first we decided what the aims of the pruning were. The trees have been allowed to grow a bit wild which makes them great as a habitat but the pruning would help to promote tree health and improved crop. The aims are not complementary and that made it difficult in the beginning to decide on a strategy.


This is often something that we can struggle with any of our gardening aims. Balancing the needs of nature and the needs of humans are not always compatible and these decisions are hard. Particularly as a group who may have divergent views, or feel they do not know enough to choose a course of action. In the end we were able to agree a compromise with half reserved for habitat with some pruning for health and the other half would be cut back quite dramatically to get to a spacing that would promote fewer but stronger and more productive trees.


There was also time to look at the Victoria plum and identify branches that we could prune to promote healthy and strong growth for the tree.




While there were many people helping the plums are close together and it wasn't practical to prune more than two trees in the area at a time. So there is still more work to do but we now have a strategy that should be maintainable in the future.

It was a fantastic learning experience and if you have fruit trees in your own garden then check out https://www.theorchardproject.org.uk/about-us/ for more advice and opportunities for you to learn about caring for your fruit trees.

Maybe you're inspired to start a new orchard? This year our friend Martin Cobley has helped establish the first Community Orchard in Wandsworth Borough. Congratulations! If you want to visit, contact him at wendelsworthra@gmail.com

Foodival 2017 Growers

Thank you so much to all the fantastic donors who make the Tooting Foodival happen.  Here they are in their "I Grew This" photos and this is what they grew and donated:

Jon - chives, beetroot & rhubarb
Kath - runner beans and potatoes
Debbie - raspberries, blackberries, courgettes, sweet corn, pears, cucumelons, onions, cavolo nero & pumpkin
Richard - carrots, chives, rosemary, potatoes & tomatoes
Indrajit - grapes
Heide - apples, pears and bay leaves
David - runner beans, tomatoes & kohl rabi
Mal - tomatoes
Jane - apples & leeks
Abundance Southfields - apples (thank you Richard)
Barbara - beans & lettuce
Tamworth Allotments - rocket & chard
Maggie - nasturtiums & mint
Judy - pears
Kelly - apples, chillis, tomatoes, carrots, sage, rosemary, cabbage, lemon balm, beans kale & chives
Chris - pumpkin & 2lbs of safari beans
Esther - tomatoes
Eleanor - blackberries & pears
Helen - rosemary & marrow
Tooting Community Garden - 25kg of potatoes, curly kale, cavolo ner, swiss chard, coriander, fennel, callaloo, young Jerusalem artichoke, pattypan squash, rosemary & sage, Paradise Co-op - beans, tomato, bay leaves & herbs
Doddington & Rollo Community Garden - coriander, rosemary & sage
SHARE Community Garden - cabbages & a fantastic plant display

Foodival 2017: "Thank You" to Tooting's community of volunteers

The 10th Tooting Foodival was only possible because of 

many volunteers' help and donations.

Thank you all!

Click here to see the details. Well over forty people helped on the day, plus many in preparation and in the long tail of follow up.
Each of these people and organisations made the Foodival happen, and while there's no priority order we want to highlight Naseem Aboobaker who has demonstrated such community spirit by offering us the hall at Mushkil Aasaan for free at so many Foodivals past.
It's always a risk to make a list and get it 100% correct - please let us know if we've left you out.

Here she is at the 2010 Foodival

The Foodival is nothing without an audience! We lost count at around 500 people - first-timers and some very loyal regulars.

Here is one young girl we know and want to celebrate - same road, maybe the same chair.

2010 to 2017! 

And at the 2017 Foodival

Get in touch with us if you fancy being part of TTT's 2018 Tooting Foodival co-ordination group.
We promise you fun, space to try out creative ideas, experience of live project management and lots of community support!