Horticultural Expert Ellen Mary will host an entertaining evening with some twenty-four-carrot advice from medical herbalist Maureen Robertson and veganic grower Piers Warren.

Please send your questions to: events@veganorganic.net

Thursday 29th December

7pm-7.45pm UK Time

Click here to watch live on YouTube

The panel:

Ellen Mary: Is a horticultural radio show host, TV presenter, writer and of course vegan. She has travelled all over the world to discuss the benefits that nature provides to our wellbeing – specifically gardening.  Her first book ‘The Joy of Gardening; the everyday zen of mowing the lawn‘ was released in May 2021.

For more information visit https://www.ellenmarygardening.co.uk/

Maureen Robertson Medical Herbalist:

Maureen has over 25 years of experience working with herbs and sharing the Green knowledge. She co-founded the Scottish School of Herbal Medicine in 1992.  She encountered Goethe’s way of studying “the Holy Open Book of Nature” as shared by Rudolf Steiner and discovered an approach of wholeness to studying plants, landscape and natural phenomena. She developed a clinical application of Goethe’s method which shaped her herbal practice and the way she supports the healing process for the people she works with. In 2012 she established the Herbal Apprenticeship at Drimlabarra Herb Farm, Isle of Arran, Scotland which she ran for 4 years before relocating to Portugal. Her travels in Peru and Ecuador meeting shamans and teacher plants helped create a deepening into the interior world of self-healing and the shamanic practices which aid these processes are now an integral part of her approach to purification and rejuvenation.

For courses and information visit The Herbal Path.

Piers Warren: Conservationist, author and keen grower of organic fruit and vegetables. He is the founder of Wildeye – The International School of Wildlife Film-making. Writer of several books and co-author of The Vegan Cook and Gardener.
More about Piers https://wildeye.co.uk/piers-warren/The Vegan Cook & Gardener https://veganorganic.net/product/vegan-cook-and-gardener/

Veganic Gardeners’ Question Time hopes to inspire and bring new ideas to foragers, growers and gardeners alike.

Now more than ever it is vital that we engage with how our food is grown.

Tune into our show and become part of the growing revolution which can not only transform your garden plot but also change the way the world grows its food.

A Vegan Organic Network production.

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• 02/16/2023 – VON News and Events
• 02/07/2023 – VON News and Events
• 01/19/2023 – VON News and Events
• 01/16/2023 – Veganic Wild Foraging Guide for January

• 10/27/2022 – VON News and Events
• 10/20/2022 – News and Events
• 10/18/2022 – Tree of Life Veganics Interview
• 10/12/2022 – Organic Matters Conference 2022,
• 10/06/2022 – VON News and Events
• 09/23/2022 – Tolhurst’s Veganic Squash & Pumpkin Fest Sunday 2nd October
• 09/13/2022 – VON News and Events
• 08/30/2022 – VON News and Events
• 08/12/2022 – VON News and Events!
• 07/28/2022 – Veganic News and Events
• 07/20/2022 – A Day In The Life On Tolhurst’s Stockfree Organic Farm
• 07/05/2022 – Vegan Organic News and Events
• 06/29/2022 – Tonight 7pm  Gardening with Abundance
• 06/19/2022 – George Monbiot interview and new film
• 05/31/2022 – VON News, Events, Video
• 05/26/2022 – Tonight 7pm Veganic Gardeners Question Time
• 05/19/2022 – The Guardian Features Veganic Farm

Kerri Waters – Viva! Farmers Coordinator will host an entertaining evening with some twenty-four carrot advice from permaculture teacher Aranya, forest gardener Jonathan Barker and Anton Rosenfeld from Garden Organic.

Please send your questions to: events@veganorganic.net

Tuesday 29th November

7pm-7.45pm UK Time

Click here to watch live on YouTube

Kerri Waters – Viva! Farmers Coordinator

Kerri Waters is a PhD researcher and project coordinator for Viva! Farming – an organisation helping animal farmers transition to alternative forms of farming. Her interest in farming and food grew when she worked for Defra during her studies at the Rural Payment Agency processing subsidies for farmers. It was here that she first understood the financial and political problems the farming community faces in today’s modern food system. Driven by a passion for food, she has worked as a chef in kitchens across the UK and France and studied French cuisine in Paris. She became vegan in 2016 after realising the environmental impacts of animal agriculture and meeting the love of her life – a cairn terrier called Rufus. Since then, she has campaigned for a better world for animals and a fairer food system. She is currently conducting doctoral research looking at a just transition for animal farmers beyond animal-based agriculture.

Viva! Farming:  https://vivafarming.org.uk/

Anton Rosenfeld Research Officer at Garden Organic:

Anton Rosenfeld has been with Garden Organic for 18 years. His work has ranged from projects with commercial field-scale growers to small-scale community gardens and allotments.  He has worked as a grower, runs many training courses and regularly writes for Grow Your Own and Kitchen Garden magazine.  He has a passion for soils, composting and growing veg from a wide range of cultures and horizons. He is a keen advocate of a vegan diet and veganic gardening and has been vegan for over 30 years.

Aranya: is one of Britain’s leading permaculture teachers, having taught nearly 100 two-week permaculture design courses (PDCs) since 2005. He’s author of the popular ‘Permaculture Design – a Step-by-Step Guide’, translated into 5  languages, and launched an online course last summer based on the design process described in the book. He’s currently finishing a second book, about the application of systems thinking and patterns in permaculture design, due to be published in 2022. He’s been gardening for 35 years, loves growing food and is especially interesting in low-input systems like forest gardening and no-dig.

Aranya’s website: https://www.learnpermaculture.com

Jonathan Barker: Jonathan Barker has been vegan for 22 years and has managed a forest garden in Essex for 11 years. We have planted around 4500 trees on our 6 acre smallholding which is managed for nature as well as producing abundant yields of fruits, vegetable and nuts. As well as being a manager for Environmental charity the Wilderness Foundation, Jonathan encourages community engagement with sustainable food production and would like to see the forest garden model spread throughout the UK.

Veganic Gardeners’ Question Time hopes to inspire and bring new ideas to foragers, growers and gardeners alike.

Now more than ever it is vital that we engage with how our food is grown.

Tune into our show and become part of the growing revolution which can not only transform your garden plot but also change the way the world grows its food.

A Vegan Organic Network production.

Foraging: what to look out for November/December

Live on YouTube

Free ticket and event reminders

Woods and hedgerows are great places to find wild food and connect with the landscape. Join our seasoned foragers and nutritionists for your guide to sustainable foraging, find out what’s in season and how to eat it.

Wednesday 23rd November 7pm-7.35pm

Our panel:

Juliette Bryant is a leading figure in the field of health transformation. She has travelled the world seeking out and studying the most effective tools and plants for achieving good health and healing. Juliette is keen to get people to see what is the their local environment and how they can work with the gifts of mother nature. Juliette has three published books and written countless articles for magazines, newspapers and journals, all arising from her extensive research into healthy living, wellbeing and nutrition. 

She offers her professional services as a Nutritional Health Consultant to individuals and groups within both public and business sectors. Juliette also offers foraging courses as well as sacred sexuality courses. Her dynamic, intuitive and evidenced presentations are well received, enjoyable and noted for the simplicity and accessibility.Her website www.juliettebryant.com features a wealth of original, free content as well as details of her online courses, mentorship work and an extensive range of superfood blends, tonics and supplements – organically produced using plant-based ingredients and sought by customers the world over.

Jon Dale
Jon forages for edible wild foods in the natural habitat where he lives in Cornwall. He runs a veganic project ‘Willow Way’, near Newquay, a place of education, teaching self sufficiency and veganic principles. To help heal the earth and help people to reduce their footprint. Also to help people become engaged with where their food comes from and how it is grown and also to reverse illness through this lifestyle.
 

Jo Barker
Jo Barker is a Forest Gardener and Permaculturalist. She has been designing, making and eating edible gardens since the last century and is passionate about plants and people.

She founded Future Food Forests CIC in 2021 with a vision to make food forests more accessible and useable for more people. She believes that this connects us to a natural way humans have co-existed on Earth since we began. Foraging in Food Forests is a big part of this, and she believes everywhere is a Food Forest. She has the principle that everything is edible if you know how. Jo holds the unofficial record for ingredients in a UK salad at over 300!

ADDY FERN:- PLANTS FOR A FUTURE
Addy Fern has been involved with Plants For A Future since the beginning, when a 36 acre, extremely exposed and degraded field of bare barley stubble was bought in 1989.

 Plants for a Future was set up to demonstrate that we could obtain all our needs from plants, without the need to exploit animals, humans, or the Environment. Since then, the bare barley field has become a beautiful, sheltered piece of Land, where a wide variety of useful trees, shrubs, and mostly perennial herbaceous plants are grown. It is quite enchanting to walk around the Land and see all these amazing trees and other plants, and have tastes of their various edible parts. Addy Fern gives guided tours of the Land, so people have an opportunity to see and taste and experience them. You can also learn a lot by coming to spend some time volunteering.

The aims and ideals of PFAF have since been extended to include:-

* Helping people to re-connect with nature. Our ability to genuinely bring this environmental and climate crisis back from the brink of disaster is through the understanding that we are part of the intricate and delicate web of life on our beautiful Planet that we call Earth.

* The Importance of re-wilding/Re-afforestation.

 We have destroyed so much of our native wild habitat, frequently some kind of Forest, that the delicate balance of Nature is seriously at risk. Re-afforestation is vital to try to offset this.

*Food Growing – Growing our food in Harmony with Nature  is Vital. This is where Forest gardening and Permaculture come in.

* Plant-based Agriculture is a very important way that we can help to stem the tide of destruction to our Planet, as growing food direct for humans, rather than feeding it to animals first and then eating the animals, saves a lot of land, which can then be returned to woodland.

Addy Fern is in the process of organising the upgrading of facilities at the Land, and also planning to co-run various courses on various aspects of PFAF at the Land in Cornwall.

If you would like to get in touch, you can email pfaf@theferns.info; or phone 01208-873554

You can also see our website pfaf.theferns.info

Vegan Organic Fest 2022

Vegan Organic Network’s second annual Vegan Organic Fest was held Aug 18-22 at Chyan Community in west Cornwall. 

VON’s Dan Graham organised the event with a great line-up of speakers, workshop leaders and live music. For those who don’t know him, Dan’s style of leadership is to provide an excellent basic framework and to let the event unfold organically, giving everyone the opportunity to contribute.   This pure form of anarchy, once again delivered the goods – with the 100 odd attendees featuring a veritable United Nations of people having a wonderful time.

First a word about the venue.  Chyan is a 13-acre veganic apple farm which runs permaculture and circus skills courses in a beautiful landscape, tucked in a valley with spring water, a brook, interesting eco-buildings and plenty of fresh food.  During the event, a message from the local council shockingly came through trying to evict members of the community.  These are the very people who maintain the site to such a high standard allowing VON and others groups to be there.  Their website is ww.chyan.org if you would like to send them a letter of support.

Now to the event itself.  Like last year, Dan had put together an awesome events programme with activities starting on the Friday morning, Thursday being a day to pitch the tent, park the camper van and settle in to meet old friends and make new ones.  As seems to be the vibe with VON, everyone was super-friendly and it was lovely to chat to people – united in our common cause – the quest for a vegan organic lifestyle, and to spread out the message to the world.

There was so much for participants to do!  Sometimes there were three activities going on at one time, which meant you had a choice between things like Chakra Dancing, Foraging, Tai Chi, Circus Skills, Singing, Willow Weaving, Forest Gardening, Raw Food Demos, Vegan Organic Talks, Nutrition, Animal Welfare, Yoga, Gong Baths & Sound Healing (sorry if I forgot to mention them all.)  Iain Tolhurst, the esteemed veganic grower visited the event on the Saturday and had a big smile talking to people.

With so much to do, there was also plenty of opportunity to chill out, chat and there was always the on-site eco-spa to enjoy with spring-fed swimming pool, sauna and hot-tub.  You could treat yourself to a holistic therapy or browse the few stalls on show.  And the food was fantastic.  Veganic of course, and you could tell it was really made with love by the awesome kitchen staff.

On a personal note, it brought me great joy to see my 5-year old walking about the site with bare feet, knowing he was safe and free to explore.  And having a few days in a tent away from wi-fi and screens was restful and healing.

The live music was absolutely fantastic (even though the PA system was held together with tape and featured an assortment of random amps and speakers).  Dave & Clive from Inner Voice took listeners on a trip with their flute and guitar.  BFriendly with Ian & Cathy Haywood brought a vegan reggae vibe to a sunny evening.  432 amazed the crowd with sing-a-long covers and originals (all played in the healing 432htz tuning).  Marc Barnwell wowed the crowd with his Spanish and electric guitar wizardry.  Dark Station led the festival in a set of uplifting covers.  Vegan Queen V gave a live performance of her new Freedom Warrior album.  And I had the joy of headlining Friday with The Perpetual Choirs, Saturday with Peace On Your Plate and Sunday with an acoustic set with many of the musicians joining me.  We got the crowd in a ceremonial circle singing for peace and freedom.  It was quite something!

A lasting highlight of the event was the circle led by Dan Graham to ask people what they’d got out of the event, and the projects they are involved with.  Tears filled people’s eyes as stories were told of personal transformation and joy that seemingly everyone had experienced to some degree. 

The Vegan Organic Network really came out of this with its stock high (though with no stock animals used or needed).  It was certainly an event about quality over quantity of people, and I’m sure everyone who attended will now be singing the praises of the vegan organic movement, and will want to attend more events under the VON banner.

Giles Bryant.

Click here to vote

VON at The Martin’s Act Bicentenary Anniversary Conference 2022

Hello readers, I’m Michelle St John, the founder of an educational initiative called VinE, Veganism in Education.  We produce and recommend learning materials for teachers concerned with encouraging empathy, good health and sustainable choice-making in their students.  We recently partnered with VON in order to support each other’s work and explore opportunities for collaborative projects.

My personal experience of the Vegan Organic Network goes further back in time, and living near Manchester, I’ve been fortunate to attend many of their fantastic events.

THE EARLY YEARS!

I particularly recall a VON fair held in the grounds of a venue in Chorlton. It was a beautiful sunny day and the place was ‘buzzing’. It was especially memorable because it was the first vegan fair my family and I had ever attended; we thought we’d entered heaven!  New to veganism, it was wonderful to feel welcomed into a wider like-minded community.  The joy and pride we experienced in just attending, made us giddy with excitement!

Needless to say, we gorged ourselves on all the delicious food and purchased an insane amount of vegan goodies, including a copious number of T-shirts which we still wear today!  This event set our benchmark standard for vegan fairs and festivals; it remains unsurpassed!

JANUARY 2022

Several years on, the stars aligned once more, and VON appeared at another key moment in my vegan journey. Having just launched VinE, MAD Ideas (a VON Sponsor and VinE Ambassador) told me about VON’s ‘Save Our Wildlife’ competition. I’m forever grateful to them for informing me about this competition, and linking our organisations together. 

VON was the first organisation to feature on the VinE website. Their wonderful video of competition entries, demonstrated how a vegan organisation could help educate children and young people about animal rights and related health, social justice and environmental issues, in a creative and impactful way.

JULY 2022

In July, an opportunity arose to share VON’s ‘Save Our Wildlife’ competition with a global audience attending a joint UK Centre for Animal Law (A-LAW) and Universities for Animal Welfare (UFAW) conference, celebrating the bicentenary of the ‘Martin’s Act’. This was Britain’s first legislation protecting animals from deliberate acts of cruelty.

Parliament passed the Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act in 1822. The statute became known as the ‘Martin’s Act’ after its sponsor, the MP and animal rights campaigner Richard Martin. While it only protected a limited number of species from certain types of abuse, it was the first time that legislation had been passed with the interest of animals at its’ heart.

WHO WAS RICHARD MARTIN?

At this point, I think it’s worth delving a little deeper into the Act and the great man behind it. If time travel existed and I had the chance to meet revered figures from the past, Richard Martin would feature high on my list!

Born in Galway in 1754, he was a spirited defender of the poor and animals.  Indeed, such was his compassion for his fellow creatures, even King George IV dubbed him ‘Humanity Dick.’

While this progressive Act made it illegal to harm certain animals, it also stipulated it was up to private citizens to bring charges of cruelty before the magistrates.  As with most legislation, the real challenge for its efficacy lay in its enforcement.

Never one to shy away from fighting for the rights of animals, Martin mounted a prosecution against Bill Burns, a London hawker of fruit and vegetables, who had been caught beating his donkey.

Deploying unusual tactics, Martin took the extraordinary decision to lead the donkey into the courtroom so that the injuries and its’ state of neglect could be seen. So severe were the injuries, the magistrate found Burns guilty, making him the first person to be convicted of animal cruelty.  The famous painting by P Mathews depicts the courtroom scene.

(picture) http://www.artnet.de/k%c3%bcnstler/p-matthews/the-trial-of-bill-burns-under-martins-act-X8yAbjDLSyPcSozSShv1uw2

In 1824, two years after the Act was passed, in a coffee house on St Martins Lane in London, a group of men met with the idea of forming a society concerned with enforcing the Martin’s Act and heightening awareness of animal welfare.  The group included Richard Martin, Reverend Arthur Broome and William Wilberforce.  This society was initially named the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), later receiving royal assent from Queen Victoria, making it the RSPCA.

BACK TO THE CONFERENCE!

The conference marking this bicentenary anniversary would feature leading scientists, lawyers and advocates sharing their visions for the future of animal law.  A series of talks would be given over five days (18^th – 22^nd July), with each day focused on a different area of interest. The last day would feature presentations on education policy, with the final slot reserved for children and young people’s visions of a better future for animals.

As a former barrister and member of A-LAW, I was approached by their chairperson, Paula Sparks. She noticed I’d set up an educational initiative, and wondered if I had any ideas for the young people’s programme as they had nothing scheduled?  I immediately thought of VON’s ‘Save Our Wildlife’ competition and forwarded their video of exhibits. Paula thought it was fantastic! VON’s contribution became the foundation on which we built the hour long ‘Young Voices’ programme.

Dan Graham did us proud! His introduction to VON and the competition was really engaging and professional. Both VinE and the conference organisers are thankful to everyone at VON for helping make this section of the conference such a success. The positive feedback we’ve received has been tremendous!

VinE is looking forward to working on future educational projects with VON.  Researching opportunities for the greater inclusion of vegan organic growing initiatives in schools is an exciting prospect.

Watch VON at the conference

Stockfree Organic at Organic Growers Alliance OGA conference Organic Matters

Stockfree Organic is the farming branch of VON.

18^th October 2022, Birmingham

The Organic Matters conference is the most important event for OGA team and its 400 strong membership.

The event attracts over 200 small-scale growers (on-line and in person) who share the same aspirations about growing and offering food to local communities in the most environmentally friendly ways possible.

Speakers include experts, practitioners, and researchers from across the country and the day is structured in multiple workshops and plenary sessions that mirror the nowadays issues and achievements in organic horticulture.

This year’s programme included speeches on

• The profile of organic consumers
• Extending the growing season
• Coping with cost of living crisis
• Mental health and small-scale horticulture, and more.

Vegan Organic Network was a proud sponsor of 2022 Organic Matters conference and was featured in a plenary session dedicated to Soil Health and Carbon sequestration. Iain Tolhurst of Tolhurst Organic, Centre of Excellent for Stockfree Organic and Veganic Food presented the results of most recent soil tests at his farm, showing amazing resilience of stockfree organic soils, albeit intensively farmed for annual vegetables. Iain also updated the audience on the most recent developments with the Stockfree Organic Standards.

VON had a stand promoting our Stockfree Organic Standards with a newly developed banner and leaflets aimed at organic farmers and growers interested to become Stockfree Organic. Sparrow Middleton, manning the stall, says “A lot of growers came up to pick up a flier and chat, especially after Tolly’s presentation”.

VON will continue contacting OGA members via their quarterly magazine The Organic Grower.

It is interesting that a special workshop was dedicated to grower-to-grower certification schemes, such as IFOAM-approved Participatory Guarantee Schemes (PGS), now widely spread across the world. These are very similar scheme to the VON “Grower-to-Grower” inspections.

However, given the very intensive and time-consuming nature of such schemes, it was felt that these could be more appropriate for new entrant groups of young growers.

The theme will be discussed again in January at the Oxford Real Farming Conference.

Farming for the Planet

Vegfest COP27 Conference

Sunday 13th November 1pm

Tickets and information

Dan Graham and Iain Tolhurst

Dan from Vegan Organic Network introduces the work of the charity and the solutions they present, before Iain from Tolhurst Organics continues.

How to Maintain and Enhance Soil Organic Carbon (S.O.C.) in Arable/Horticultural Stockfree Organic Farms

The presentation will develop the concept and practice of maintaining and building SOC within rotational vegetable/arable cropping within a stockfree organic system of culture.

How and where does the Carbon come from will be discussed, along with the principles of crop rotations, choosing the green manure mixes and applications of ramial chipped wood or composter woodchip.

The presentation will bring results of 2022 tests on deep soil carbon contents at Tolhurst Organic farm in South Oxfordshire, land which has been in continuous vegetable production  and without any animal inputs since 1987.

BEYOND THE POSSIBLE: EXPANDING THE BOUNDARIES OF FARMING AND CROFTING

Stockfree Farming is hosting a free series of webinars – by farmers for farmers – on radical, stockfree land management beginning NOVEMBER 1ST.  Full details and registration can be found at the link above or at https://stockfreefarming.org/beyond-the-possible .

THRIVING BEYOND THE PROTEIN TRANSITION: FARMER AND CROFTER RECEPTIVENESS TO STOCKFREE LAND MANAGEMENT

Stockfree Farming conducted a qualitative survey of Scottish Farmers and Crofters between 2021-2022. The results are published on our website.  The need to reduce the production and consumption of animal products has been widely accepted as a climate change mitigation measure.  The missing piece up to now has been how the farmers themselves feel about this.  Our survey addressed this, and the results have surprised us – in a good way! You can read some of the highlights and download the full report at https://stockfreefarming.org/survey-report . 

Farming for a Future

Jo Kidd co-founder of Tree of Life Veganic talks to Luke Scott.

8pm Sunday 30^th October

Click here to watch live on YouTube

Click here for reminders and a free ticket

Jo Kidd and her family run a small veganic, forest farm near Faversham in Kent.

They started farming in 2018 having been vegan since 2003 and building on previous projects, are following their passion to live as ethically and compassionately and as close to the earth as possible.

They love woodchip and use a no plough approach, no single use plastic, no concrete and are off grid.

All the produce is sold locally, within a 5-mile radius and deliveries are by electric vehicle.

Tree of Life Veganics are applying for a Vegan Organic Network grant to be certified Stockfree Organic which is administered through the Soil Association.

Listen to the show to find out about their plans for the future!