![\"\"](\"https:\/\/news.truthjuice.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/fruit_and_veg-150x150.jpg\" "\\"fruit_and_veg\\"")
are three large raised flower beds.<\/p>\nAdmittedly, it sounds like the most foolhardy of criminal capers, and one of the cheekiest, too.<\/p>\n
Outside the police station in the small Victorian mill town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire, there are three large raised flower beds.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019d visited a few months ago, you\u2019d have found them overflowing with curly kale, carrot plants, lettuces, spring onions \u2014 all manner of vegetables and salad leaves.<\/p>\n
Today the beds are bare. Why? Because people have been wandering up to the police station forecourt in broad daylight and digging up the vegetables. And what are the cops doing about this brazen theft from right under their noses? Nothing.<\/p>\n
Well, that\u2019s not quite correct.<\/p>\n
\u2018I watch \u2019em on camera as they come up and pick them,\u2019 says desk officer Janet Scott, with a huge grin. It\u2019s the smile that explains everything.<\/p>\n
For the vegetable-swipers are not thieves. The police station carrots \u2014 and thousands of vegetables in 70 large beds around the town \u2014 are there for the taking. Locals are encouraged to help themselves. A few tomatoes here, a handful of broccoli there. If they\u2019re in season, they\u2019re yours. Free.<\/p>\n
So there are (or were) raspberries, apricots and apples on the canal towpath; blackcurrants, redcurrants and strawberries beside the doctor\u2019s surgery; beans and peas outside the college; cherries in the supermarket car park; and mint, rosemary, thyme and fennel by the health centre.<\/p>\n
The vegetable plots are the most visible sign of an amazing plan: to make Todmorden the first town in the country that is self-sufficient in food.<\/p>\n
\u2018And we want to do it by 2018,\u2019 says Mary Clear, 56, a grandmother of ten and co-founder of Incredible Edible, as the scheme is called.<\/p>\n
\u2018It\u2019s a very ambitious aim. But if you don\u2019t aim high, you might as well stay in bed, mightn\u2019t you?\u2019<\/p>\n
So what\u2019s to stop me turning up with a huge carrier bag and grabbing all the rosemary in the town?<\/p>\n
\u2018Nothing,\u2019 says Mary.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s to stop me nabbing all the apples?<\/p>\n
\u2018Nothing.\u2019<\/p>\n
All your raspberries?<\/p>\n
\u2018Nothing.\u2019<\/p>\n
It just doesn\u2019t happen like that, she says. \u2018We trust people. We truly believe \u2014 we are witness to it \u2014 that people are decent.\u2019<\/p>\n
When she sees the Big Issue seller gathering fruit for his lunch, she feels only pleasure. What does it matter, argues Mary, if once in a while she turns up with her margarine tub to find that all the strawberries are gone?<\/p>\n
\u2018This is a revolution,\u2019 she says. \u2018But we are gentle revolutionaries. Everything we do is underpinned by kindness.\u2019<\/p>\n
The idea came about after she and co-founder Pam Warhurst, the former owner of the town\u2019s Bear Cafe, began fretting about the state of the world and wondered what they could do.<\/p>\n
They reasoned that all they could do is start locally, so they got a group of people, mostly women, together in the cafe.<\/p>\n
Incredible Edible is about more than plots of veg. It’s about educating people about food, and stimulating the local economy (pictured Vincent Graff and Estelle)<\/p>\n
\u2018Wars come about by men having drinks in bars, good things come about when women drink coffee together,\u2019 says Mary.<\/p>\n
\u2018Our thinking was: there\u2019s so much blame in the world \u2014 blame local government, blame politicians, blame bankers, blame technology \u2014 we thought, let\u2019s just do something positive instead.\u2019<\/p>\n
We\u2019re standing by a car park in the town centre. Mary points to a housing estate up the hill. Her face lights up.<\/p>\n
\u2018The children walk past here on the way to school. We\u2019ve filled the flower beds with fennel and they\u2019ve all been taught that if you bite fennel, it tastes like a liquorice gobstopper. When I see the children popping little bits of herb into their mouths, I just think it\u2019s brilliant.\u2019<\/p>\n
She takes me over to the front garden of her own house, a few yards away.<\/p>\n
Three years ago, when Incredible Edible was launched, she did a very unusual thing: she lowered her front wall, in order to encourage passers-by to walk into her garden and help themselves to whatever vegetables took their fancy.<\/p>\n
There were signs asking people to take something but it took six months for folk to \u2018get it\u2019, she says.<\/p>\n
They get it now. Obviously a few town-centre vegetable plants \u2014 even thousands of them \u2014 are not going to feed a community of 15,000 by themselves.<\/p>\n
But the police station potatoes act as a recruiting sergeant \u2014 to encourage residents to grow their own food at home.<\/p>\n
Today, hundreds of townspeople who began by helping themselves to the communal veg are now well on the way to self-sufficiency.<\/p>\n
But out on the street, what gets planted where? There\u2019s kindness even in that.<\/p>\n
\u2018The ticket man at the railway station, who was very much loved, was unwell. Before he died, we asked him: \u201cWhat\u2019s your favourite vegetable, Reg?\u201d It was broccoli. So we planted memorial beds with broccoli at the station. One stop up the line, at Hebden Bridge, they loved Reg, too \u2014 and they\u2019ve also planted broccoli in his memory.\u2019<\/p>\n
Not that all the plots are \u2014 how does one put this delicately? \u2014 \u2018official\u2019.<\/p>\n
Take the herb bushes by the canal. Owners British Waterways had no idea locals had been sowing plants there until an official inspected the area ahead of a visit by the Prince of Wales last year (Charles is a huge Incredible Edible fan).<\/p>\n
Estelle Brown, a 67-year-old former interior designer who tended the plot, received an email from British Waterways.<\/p>\n
\u2018I was a bit worried to open it,\u2019 she says. \u2018But it said: \u201cHow do you build a raised bed? Because my boss wants one outside his office window.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n
Incredible Edible is also about much more than plots of veg. It\u2019s about educating people about food, and stimulating the local economy.<\/p>\n
There are lessons in pickling and preserving fruits, courses on bread-making, and the local college is to offer a BTEC in horticulture. The thinking is that young people who have grown up among the street veg may make a career in food.<\/p>\n
Crucially, the scheme is also about helping local businesses. The Bear, a wonderful shop and cafe with a magnificent original Victorian frontage, sources all its ingredients from farmers within a 30-mile radius.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a brilliant daily market. People here can eat well on local produce, and thousands now do.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the local school was recently awarded a \u00a3500,000 Lottery grant to set up a fish farm in order to provide food for the locals and to teach useful skills to young people.<\/p>\n
Jenny Coleman, 62, who retired here from London, explains: \u2018We need something for our young people to do. If you\u2019re an 18-year-old, there\u2019s got to be a good answer to the question: why would I want to stay in Todmorden?\u2019<\/p>\n
The day I visit, the town is battered by a bitterly-cold rain storm.\u00a0 Yet the place radiates warmth. People speak to each other in the street, wave as neighbours drive past, smile.<\/p>\n
If the phrase hadn\u2019t been hijacked, the words \u2018we\u2019re all in this together\u2019 would spring to mind.<\/p>\n
So what sort of place is Todmorden (known locally, without exception, as \u2018Tod\u2019)? If you\u2019re assuming it\u2019s largely peopled by middle-class grandmothers, think again. Nor is this place a mecca for the gin-and-Jag golf club set.<\/p>\n
Set in a Pennine valley \u2014 once, the road through the town served as the border between Yorkshire and Lancashire \u2014 it is a vibrant mix of age, class and ethnicity.<\/p>\n
A third of households do not own a car; a fifth do not have central heating.<\/p>\n
You can snap up a terrace house for \u00a350,000 \u2014 or spend close to \u00a31\u2009million on a handsome stone villa with seven bedrooms.<\/p>\n
And the scheme has brought this varied community closer together, according to Pam Warhurst.<\/p>\n
Take one example. \u2018The police have told us that, year on year, there has been a reduction in vandalism since we started,\u2019 she says. \u2018We weren\u2019t expecting this.\u2019<\/p>\n
So why has it happened?<\/p>\n
Pam says: \u2018If you take a grass verge that was used as a litter bin and a dog toilet and turn it into a place full of herbs and fruit trees, people won\u2019t vandalise it. I think we are hard-wired not to damage food.\u2019<\/p>\n
Pam reckons a project like Incredible Edible could thrive in all sorts of places. \u2018If the population is very transient, it\u2019s difficult. But if you\u2019ve got schools, shops, back gardens and verges, you can do it.\u2019<\/p>\n
Similar schemes are being piloted in 21 other towns in the UK, and there\u2019s been interest shown from as far afield as Spain, Germany, Hong Kong and Canada. And, this week, Mary Clear gave a talk to an all-party group of MPs at Westminster.<\/p>\n
Todmorden was visited by a planner from New Zealand, working on the rebuilding of his country after February\u2019s earthquake.<\/p>\n
Mary says: \u2018He went back saying: \u201cWhy wouldn\u2019t we rebuild the railway station with pick-your-own herbs? Why wouldn\u2019t we rebuild the health centre with apple trees?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018What we\u2019ve done is not clever. It just wasn\u2019t being done.\u2019<\/p>\n
The final word goes to an outsider. Joe Strachan is a wealthy U.S. former sales director who decided to settle in Tod with his Scottish wife, after many years in California.<\/p>\n
He is 61 but looks 41. He became active with Incredible Edible six months ago, and couldn\u2019t be happier digging, sowing and juicing fruit.<\/p>\n
I find myself next to him, sheltering from the driving rain. Why, I ask, would someone forsake the sunshine of California for all this?<\/p>\n
His answer sums up what the people around here have achieved.<\/p>\n
\u2018There\u2019s a nobility to growing food and allowing people to share it. There\u2019s a feeling we\u2019re doing something significant rather than just moaning that the state can\u2019t take care of us.<\/p>\n
\u2018Maybe we all need to learn to take care of ourselves.\u2019<\/p>\n
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