20 pledges for 2020: how foraging for blackberries helped us stay on track for zero waste

Embarrassingly, it has taken me a decade to engage with Britain’s green and pleasant land

Apples for sale from the orchards of Perry Court Farm near Ashford, Kent (PA)

Never before have I gone blackberry picking with intent.  

A big fan of whimsically browsing the bramble with the kids, this year was another matter entirely.  

We had freezer space to fill if we were going to up our zero waste game to zero recycling and those staining little fruits, we are sure, hold the answer.  

Free, seasonal, no packaging, zero food miles, abundant, vegan and full of some properly impressive nutrients (polyphenols anyone?) they win on all fronts. They’re about all that has this summer.  

The tomatoes got blight, the sweetcorn got the British weather, we didn’t get as far as planting peas, the courgette is too phallic to be enjoyed as a foodstuff and I’m too short to reach the rest of the apples.  

There are, I grant you, a small range of bottles and jars of promising looking things in the cupboards now but we’re rapidly running out of a growing season. I’m determined that those blackberries (or bilberries as they’re known around here) are going to be our saving grace. They’ll need to be if we want to avoid an eco promise u-turn.

We had big plans to shift our zero waste game up a gear to zero recycling this summer, but having worked hard to embrace that particular monumental upgrade in our consuming (or in fact non-consuming) behaviour we’re now peering down a path that seems to end at self sufficiency.  

I’m not sure we’re ready for that. I’m also not sure we’ll actually be able to feed our family if we engage our usual approach to an lifestyle tweak by jumping in feet first and only afterwards remembering the easy eco wins (switching to reusable bottles, not using single use plastic, not flying, etc, etc.) ran out a couple of years ago.  

There are reasons self-sufficiency successes seem to kick in once you’re over 40, not least because you need time to read up on things like tomato blight if you ever want to eat pasta sauce again.  

But at least redoubling our efforts to reduce the impact our diet has on the environment has produced more reassuring effects in other ways.  

I moved out of the big smoke a decade ago, unconvinced I had elbows pointy enough to bring up children in London.  

And yet it was only this year, as I eyed the ravaged veg patch and scoured the foragers handbooks for freebies to tuck away at minus 15, that the wider harvest going on around us has swum into technicolour. Despite marrying into a farming family.  

I now know, for example that this week saw the start of the Great British Apple season. I might even turn up for our town’s apple day, when residents bring their home grown fruit for pressing, bottling, and the enthusiastic sampling of last year’s boozy efforts.  

Yup, it still exists. Which is lucky because we can’t go on opening the cupboard full of the buggers while looking for the grater and spending the next half an hour stemming an avalanche.

The other point is that those cupboards are actually full for once. Of stuff we made ourselves for nothing. That hopefully won’t perish anytime soon. That we can draw from on the darkest of days to smother on toast as if we don’t have a care in the world.  

And it’s not just us. Our friendship group is your standard bunch of sleep-deprived 30-somethings pretending we can adult with the best of them and regularly failing.  

And yet even here, for the first time, there has been talk of bottling and stocking the freezer and even preserves. Not a mickey-take either, an actual conversation my mum’s WI group would be in raptures over. Jars have been swapped and recipes discussed.  

I don’t think it’s a coincidence either. With the world on its head, we’ve retreated into something a bit more stable, a bit more reliable. Like the storing of food for the winter at the end of the summer.  

So come on you Brexit/Covid orthrus, do your supply chain busting worst, I’ve got more green tomato ketchup stashed away than a posh corner shop.