Transition learning

A year of growing workshops, and Snowy Seedy Saturday

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A year ago, slightly by accident, Anita Gracie – a member of the Islington Master Gardeners – came to do a workshop in Transition Dartmouth Park’s new food growing space at Highgate Newtown Community Centre. We were holding our first Seedy Saturday event which we hoped to use to generate interest in the project, but one of our workshops is cancelled at the last minute, and Anita kindly agrees to step in and fill the gap. Her ‘gardener’s question time’ proves to be one of the great highlights of the day, with people crowding into the sunny garden over lunch to draw on her expertise and ask question after question. The allotted twenty minutes turns into an hour, and at the end we invite her to come back when we actually start growing, to see how we were doing and give us advice for the next season.

We can work it out

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So I tried to explain how it is in Transition that a lot of the learning and teaching we do is not that formal. As we sat by Nick’s fire with tea and hot cross buns, we talked about skill-share and seed-swaps, plant walks and bee talks, Trade Schools and Green Drinks, it struck me that there was a time when I didn’t know about any of this knowledge-sharing, workshop-giving world either. I didn’t know what a facilitator was, or a go-round, or people who said it is not in my remit, or wave their hands in the air and bring lunch to share. There was a time when checking in had to do with the hotel, rather than a circle of strangers in some dusty church hall.