Back to the Land: Skills to Help You Go Green

Work. It's a word that implies toiling in the fields or labouring under the sun. But for many of us, work involves sitting behind a computer screen, dealing with mental rather than physical challenges. We tap data into spreadsheets, scroll and scroll and press F5 on inboxes. Humans didn't spend millions of years evolving for the comparatively sedentary lifestyles of graphic design, administration or PR. Nay, we humans evolved to survive in the great outdoors – though it's safe to say most of us would feel we don't have many skills in that area. So what if you're looking to brush up? 

Learning to grow your own food is a good starting point. Watching and nurturing a seed grow from a tiny brown speck into a frilled and fiery rocket leaf is a small experience, but one to make you feel proud of your green fingers. From their beginnings as a community project on a disused car park in 1999, Hulme Community Garden Centre in south Manchester have always put education at the heart of their (not-for-profit) business. As well as sessions for schoolchildren, the centre runs regular horticulture courses and workshops for all (they also sell a range of organic plants seven days a week, so the learning process can continue at home; and big city living is no excuse, as even the smallest of spaces will have a windowsill suitable for growing something). Squash Nutrition also run horticulture and cookery courses from their community garden in Toxteth, Liverpool.

Once you're on your way to a greater degree of self-sufficiency foodwise, you'll want to move on to drink. Recent months have seen an increase of interest in homebrewing – and for those with similar aspirations, Love Brewing run introductory courses in beer, wine and spirit making at their Liverpool showroom. Alan Wall, a barman living in Manchester, has combined his love of beer with completing a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Salford to set out on a unique path: he explains, “I have built my own kit, and I treat it all as a big science experiment, so it's all about recording details and taking measurements.” Wall grew up in Burton-on-Trent, a brewing town, to parents who brewed their own wine, and says that “my background working with brewing system design probably had something to do with my decision to start brewing later in life.” It's a decision that has led to business planning: he's increased his homebrewing capacity, with a view to selling his real ale commercially.

By now, you're probably getting really into this dietary self-sufficiency thing. Foraging is the next logical step. Who wouldn't want to have the skills to jump into a hedgerow, then emerge with a basketful of produce ready for a feast? Lee Craggs works with food every day at Manchester's wholefoods cooperative Unicorn. Concerns about how our food is produced (he talks passionately about the way supermarkets have homogenised the way we think about fruit and veg: “just because it's in a bag labelled 'baking potatoes' doesn't mean you have to bake it”) led him to a foraging course at Sale Water Park with medical herbalist Jesper Launder (via Cracking Good Food, who lead wild food forages, helping you to identify an edible mushroom from a potentially fatal piece of fungi). “It was dead good,” he enthuses. “We learned how to safely identify food like wild garlic and elderflowers, then cooked it up over an outdoor stove. Sitting outdoors on a nice evening, having a drink and a chat with some other people is the most natural thing. We live in a city but, really, we're still surrounded by nature.” With his new skills, Craggs now scans the hedgerows and parks for foraging opportunities on his cycle to work, and is planning to attend more lessons in the autumn to learn about mushrooms.