Cleavers (Galium aparine) – also known as goose grass – are showing their beautiful bodies and are ready for the picking.

Spring is the time for rejuvenation and detoxification. Cleavers comes out right in time to help that immune system fight off any yucky allergens floating around. And what a better way to kick of Spring (OK, it’s not quite spring yet!) than with a little cleavers pesto!

Cleavers Pesto

• one good sized handful of fresh cleavers
• 4 cloves garlic
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp grated parmesan (optional)

Only cut off the freshest part of the plant. If it’s woody don’t use it, it’ll make the pesto coarse. The earlier in spring the better!

Wash the fresh cleavers and puree them in a food processor (if using a blender add a little olive oil). Add olive oil a little at a time, keeping the blending process going. Add the garlic, parmesan, salt. Make sure to make it delicious so add whatever else you desire.

You can freeze this in ice cube trays to use later, or in jars. Keeps for up to 6 months.

Nettles have a bad reputation. They sting and they’re invasive – so what good could they possibly do?

Quite a lot actually. You can eat young, fresh nettle tips, they’re a magnet for beneficial wildlife, they make great plant food, and they’re just the thing for kicking your compost heap into action. And they’re free. What more could you ask for in a plant?

The nettle we’re used to in this country, Urtica dioica, is a perennial plant full of iron, calcium and magnesium – handy if you’re looking for a superfood. It’s also full of nitrogen, which is why it is so good for plant food and compost.

1. Hearty soup

For a basic soup you’ll need about 7oz of fresh nettle tips. Add 1lb of potatoes (peeled and cubed), a dash of milk and about four cups of stock. Boil the potatoes until soft and steam the nettles. Drain the
spuds and add the nettles and stock. Bring to the boil, whisk with a hand blender, add a dash of cream and season. This recipe is very flexible and you can swap some of the potatoes for other veg.

2. Spring greens

Nettles can be used in exactly the same way as spinach, almost any recipe containing spinach could use foraged nettles as an alternative ingredient. For a simple side dish, they’re best steamed for about five minutes. This preserves nettles’ nutritional content and stops them cooking down too much..

3. Reviving tea time

Nettle tea is said to help several ailments including eczema, asthma, hay fever and muscle aches and pains. It’s simple to make, too – just steep a few fresh tips in boiling water. It’s advisable to remove the
nettles when the water goes slightly green, otherwise the tea can become too bitter. Enhance the natural flavours of the tea with freshly sliced lemon and a little sugar.

4. Butterfly target

Nettles are key to the survival of butterflies, as they are the primary food source for many caterpillars including those of the comma, tortoiseshell and peacock. Without nettles caterpillars would go in search of alternative food sources, probably plumping for one of your favourite plants. So, not only do nettles help the butterflies we love so much, they also distract the caterpillars from prized plants.

5. A tasty brew

What’s not to like about a refreshing beer on a hot summer afternoon? And it’s even better if it’s free and you’ve brewed it yourself. All you need for the perfect brew is nettles, sugar, water, yeast, some lemons and cream of tartar. Check out this recipe.

6. Liquid feed

Mix nettles with water to make a nitrogen-rich feed plants will love. Cut or crush the nettles into small pieces and stuff as many as you can into a large container. Add water to the container until the nettles are fully submerged and leave for three to four weeks. It will get smelly so it is best not to leave it too close to the house. Dilute the solution to make a liquid plant food suitable for direct application. Use roughly one part of concentrate to 10 parts of water.

7. Ladybird heaven

Nettles are the number one destination for ladybirds with eggs to lay. These eggs turn into ladybird larvae, which are among the biggest friends we gardeners have. They’re ferocious predators on problem whitefly and red spider mite.

8. Quality soil

Believe it or not, nettles are fussy about where they grow – in fact, they need a soil rich in phosphates and nitrogen to really thrive. Use a patch of healthy nettles as a sign of good soil and grow plants
alongside them that thrive in similar conditions.

9. Compost booster

Chopped nettles make a useful addition to the compost heap because they act as a natural activator and speed up the decomposition process. For best results, make sure the nettles are thoroughly mixed with lots of different materials – dry, wet, soft and woody – because they can become a bit slimy on their own. Unless your heap is very hot don’t add nettle roots, just leaves – otherwise you run the risk of them forming new plants in your heap.

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The idea is that representatives from three local Transition Initiatives monitor their electricity use over an agreed time, using real time monitors with the data recorded either automatically or manually and participants reporting back at meetings to discuss ways of reducing their energy use.

Local environmentalist Prashant Vaze gave a talk on his previous experience of a local monitoring scheme, and energy and IT consultant Paul Tanner talked about his experiences of the metering challenge and looked at ways of automating and presenting the data.

The Energy Challenge arose out of three local Transition Initiatives – Transition Kentish Town, Transition Tufnell Park and Transition Dartmouth Park – doing their own talks and films, but wanting to co-operate on something practical.

Within the three groups there is experience of a previous energy monitoring project – the HiCan Home Energy Metering Project – which successfully monitored energy use over ten weeks in teams of six with 22 households, and resulted in an overall energy saving of 11% from baseline and in some cases as high as 57%. The winning contestants had 29% overall savings. All the teams except one managed to reduce their electricity use. This has obvious monetary and environmental benefits.

Prashant explained that each contestant had to attach a small sensor and wireless transmitter around the wire near the electricity meter which sends information to the display unit which tells them their power use either in kW or pence per hour. The display units had batteries and could be carried around from room to room.

The second type of meter was a plug in meter. This was inserted into the electric socket in-between the appliance and the mains electricity. It is used to measure the power use of single devices.

Each of the contestants was asked to complete a spreadsheet about their home and household and to fill in information from their standard electricity supplier meter every fortnight picking the same time and day. The first two readings – a fortnight apart – were intended to establish a baseline use for their household. The real time display meters and plug in meters were provided after week two and they were then asked to try and reduce their consumption in competition with each other. Readings were taken every two weeks for a six week period.

Several people wished to retain the meters after the competition was over, and others wanted to buy one themselves.

Prashant said that the competition aspect was of interest to some people and it had the effect of galvanising effort. Four events were held over ten weeks.

Some of the issues arising from the HiCan project will hopefully be addressed in the new project, which will include a lot more automation. This will hopefully reduce the time spent filling in spreadsheets, along with some of the physical problems about reading the display, due to location, and programming in tariff data.

Increasing automation (recording of data to a site, which can be anonymised, but also available to the individual participant through a password or app) will allow more time for feedback, group work and to institute behavioural changes.

The potential to automate and collect data is significant, along with the pooling of the data into groups, and the ability of both groups and individuals to access the data in a readily understandable format.

Paul Tanner said in his talk that average household energy prices rose from £600 in 2004 to £1,200 this year. He said if you can’t measure, you can’t manage and the advantage of automating the data is that it gets around the inconvenience of recording manually.

He showed via a series of graphs from automatic monitoring systems of temperature, energy use and costs, how money is wasted unnecessarily on heating. And he said 80% of domestic energy use goes on space and water heating.

And he went through some useful gadgets including the Network OWL which connects via Wifi, with no monitor required, and other web and phone apps. He also outlined Social Meter software, which is intended for this project.

Ten households from the three Transition Towns have already signed up to the Challenge which is due to start in January. One interesting feature is that they are from a diverse set of households and housing stock, ranging from three bedroom Mansion blocks to two bedroom seventies built flats, and 4-storey Victorian and other housing types. They also range from single occupancy, couples and families.

The Energy Groups have already agreed a bulk discount with OWL.

Vegbox is a community-led organic vegetable box scheme with a weekly selection of fresh seasonal produce, sourced as locally as possible.
You pick up your weekly veg every Wednesday from one of several pick up points round Kentish Town:

• The Thanet community centre in West Kentish Town
• The Grafton, the newly re-opening pub on Prince of Wales Road
• Flapjacks, the social enterprise cafe on Kentish Town high street
  Vegbox has been set up by members of Transition Kentish Town, with support from the pioneering box scheme Growing Communities in Hackney.

We hope to invest profits from Vegbox in food growing projects in our local area.

We’re ready to go and will be packing our first vegetables on Wednesday 5th September!

To get on board for September, make sure you sign up by the end of the day tomorrow (Wednesday 29th August).

Find out more and join up

Camden Council have said that it is important that as many people as possible support the application by responding positively. You can send an email to them.

Main consultation page on Camden Council website

Kentish Town Neighbourhood Forum application

The mechanics were Sam Parkes from Lunar Cycles, Ruth Chiat, Stephen Taylor and George Coulouris. They helped 18 owners with 18+ bikes.

We aim to teach people how to check their own bikes and to fix small problems. We’ll be having one more session under the Canopy then we’ll move indoors to Kentish Town Health Centre for subsequent monthly sessions.

He explored what life will be like if we reduce our carbon emissions by 80 per cent or more. Though it can seem a huge and daunting task, and in many ways it is, it is relatively easy to imagine what 80 per cent cuts looks like.

For example, how far back would you have to go to reduce by 80 per cent the amount that British people fly? 1972. Not so far back after all.

An interesting theme of George’s talk

Although many other indices of energy consumption don’t map as neatly to the 80 per cent figure as flights, a recurring theme of George’s talk was that if we combined the living patterns of 1972 with the technological efficiencies that we have achieved since then 80 per cent cuts in emmissions are very achievable.

For example, house insulation and boiler efficiency are far superior now to the 1970s, but rather than just heat a few well used rooms like the living room as we did then, now we heat the entire house to the temperature of the living room, which cancels out the efficiency gain.

Occupancy was another big theme of his talk. A car carrying one person is a quarter as efficient as a car carrying four people: the same applies to houses with empty bedrooms. The more we share transport, homes and stuff: the lighter we live upon the planet.

We had a wide range of ages in the room, so we had an interesting discussion about the pros and cons of life in the 1970s and 2010s. A theme we kept coming back to was technology: its revolutionary effect on labour, communications and living patterns. Someone who worked for BT described how he had helped set up an advanced teleconference that day between companies in different countries, who would never now consider flying staff around just for a meeting.

So it was quite an optimistic evening, envisioning a low carbon society that could combine the best of the past and the present.

George Marshall’s article on this theme at New Internationalist

On 20th June, the longest day of the year, governments will meet in Rio for the 2012 Earth Summit to discuss the transition to a sustainable economy.

Here in North London we’ve teamed up with neighbouring Transition Initiatives for a Festival of Transition. Join us to explore ways of living differently and imagine a greener, happier future in our local communities.

The days are long and the elderflowers are out all over Kentish Town! Hope to see you at some of our events over the next few days:

What if … we cut our carbon emissions by 80 per cent?
7pm-8:30pm, Wednesday 13th June
Venue: The Abbey Tavern, 124 Kentish Town Road, NW1 9QB

George Marshall, founder of Climate Outreach Information Network (COIN), explores what life will be like if we reduce our carbon emissions by 80% or more.

It seems a huge and daunting task, but imagine achieving that target just by turning the clock back to the time when emissions were still at that level. It turns out you don’t have to go back so far to envision a low-carbon society.

Film showing: In Transition 2.0
5:30pm, Saturday 16th June
Kentish Town Community Centre, 17 Busby Place, NW5 2SP

In Transition 2.0 is an inspirational immersion in the Transition movement, gathering stories from around the world of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Come and be excited by the amazing possibilities of the transition to a low energy future. We’ll have drinks and nibbles before the film starts.

Launch of new Bike Workshop in Kentish Town
7pm-8:30pm, Wednesday 20th June
Kentish Town Canopy, next to Kentish Town Underground Station

A new regular monthly bike workshop is launching in Kentish Town. Bring your bike and learn how to fix it yourself!

Elderflowers and envisioning on Hampstead Heath
7pm until dark, Wednesday 20th June
Meet at top of Parliament Hill

Look out for Transition Belsize/Kentish Town sign.

This is a musical picnic! Bring an instrument, some local food and drink to share, and come and swap ideas for how a more vibrant community could be created in the communities around Hampstead Heath.