Just listened to the Food and Farming Awards on Radio 4's Food Programme. It's pretty interesting, lots of inspirational stuff going on all round the country, for example there's a school in County Durham who aim to source all their food from within 50 miles of the school. Some of it is even grown on site  they have 3 allotments at the school - wow!. It's a great idea, and apart from ensuring the pupils had amazing, healthy food it also means that money spent by the school is going straight back into the local community, some of the farmers are even parents of the pupils, brilliant. Good to see my old local veg shop Unicorn getting an award. They were joint winners of Best Local Retail Outlet. As mentioned in the programme they have just bought a 21 acres site to enable them to grow their own veg, adding to the already brilliant range of local organic veg they have on offer. I've said it before, but I really miss having them around. You guys in Manchester don't realise how lucky you are, if you're not already a commited Unicorn fan I advise you to get down there ASAP. It ...

When we moved away form Manchester we put our compost bin plus all it's contents on freecycle and it was snapped up in seconds. In fact loads of people wanted it. The guy that we chose to give it to arrived with a big smile on his face, an estate car, 4 bins and a shovel. It was a smelly job, hard work too, but obviously the he knew it was worth it. An estimated 6.7 million tonnes of household food waste is thrown away each year to rot in landfill. This creates a toxic sludge and gives off greenhouse gases which contribute to climate change. As well as looking at how to avoid wasting food by your shopping behaviour and meal planning the harm caused by any unavoidable food waste (eg peelings, cores etc) could be reduced or even eliminated by composting. If you have a compost bin, or wormery your food scraps are converted into a valuable resource. The food breaks down and the nutrients they contained are put back into the soil as part of a natural cycle renewing the earth. It is a potent natural fertiliser that in large scale non-organic farming is replaced by polluting oil ...

As we're heading into the middle of apple season here's a quick note for anyone living in Manchester or Sheffield who doesn't already know about the abundance projects. This is a brilliant idea and anyone with a tree with spare, wasted fruit should get involved. From their website: "Abundance is a project to harvest the seasonal glut of local fruit like apples, pear and plums. Each year hundreds of fruit trees go unpicked either because people don’t notice them, may not be physically able to harvest them or there are just too many fruits at one time. Abundance is a team of volunteers who have been helping harvest city fruit and redistributing the surplus to the community on a non-profit basis - to community cafes, nurseries, Surestarts and individuals. Abundance ...

We're back from the wild! For various reasons we've come home a bit earlier than intended and are now on our 3 month European city break, in Liverpool, staying at our lovely 5 star self catering apartment on the Wirral (AKA Andy's Mum and Dad's). Here's the first of a three part round up of the last leg of the British tour, Islay. Jura and Colonsay coming soon. Just across from Kintyre, Islay is probably the biggest island we went to. We spent a fair amount of our time there in a B+B as Andy was ill and it rained everyday. It was strange being in a B+B when we'd been used to either tent or random hospitality from strangers. I realise this is how some people make a living, but the concept of having to pay someone £165 just to sleep in a bed for three nights and eat beans and scrambled eggs once a day seemed crazy. It must actually cost them all of about £5 per day. I don't think they were really doing it to make ends meet as some places clearly do either, the house was well posh. AND they charged us £5 to do ...