Joining a ‘veg box’ scheme has been on my list of green things I really ought to do for a couple of years but when I checked it out it seemed extremely restrictive – having to commit to the same thing every week, prohibitively expensive, or limited in what they offer.

But at the Camden Green Fair a few weeks back I visited the Farm Direct stall and their set-up is completely different.

You don’t have to order the same thing each time, and you don’t even have to place an order each week – perfect for me as I’m away such a lot. Also, they sell so much more than fruit and veg – they have meat, fish, cheese, fruit juice, bread, flowers, jams and more, with different options each week depending what they’ve sourced.

The depot is close to me in Holloway so I can go and pick it up if I can’t be in for delivery on a Saturday or Sunday. And though delivery normally costs £3.95, you get it free on your first order, and if you have a neighbour who’s also interested, they’ll deliver to you both for free. Apparently there’s someone else in my block of flats who’s already using the service so Farm Direct’s going to put me in touch with them.

Farm Direct is also much clearer on exactly where all of their produce has been sourced from, right down to the name of the farmer, unlike veg box pioneers Able & Cole who aren’t able to give you specifics. I loved reading that my minced lamb came from Nicola Bulgin’s Beatbush Organic Farm in Methwold, Norfolk; my chicken from Gill Wing’s Organic Farm in Sussex; my natural yoghurt from Chris Timotheou’s Dairy in Chalfont St Peter; my splendid rye loaf made by Matt Jones’ Flour Power City Bakery in Surrey Quays, London; spinach from Martin Mackey Ripple Farm Organics in Canterbury, and so on.

I’ve already had one salad using my rocket, cucumber and carrots and it was deeee-licious. They even threw in a bunch of dahlias for free as I had a promo code from the Fair!

But however much I’ve been impressed by the service and the quality of the produce they offered, I simply couldn’t justify it if it costs a lot more than I budget for. But I’ve just priced up what I’d normally have spent at Sainsbury’s and it’s barely any different.

In fact, the lamb, chicken and rocket came in cheaper. The total cost for the basket at Sainsbury’s would have been £17.39 (see pricing to the right).

For infinitely better quality produce, all locally-sourced, I paid just £18.36 with Farm Direct (see pricing below). And I didn’t have to struggle home on the bus with all my shopping bags!

There are still a few staples which I’ll have to go to the supermarket for – Ryvita, Actimel, tinned stuff and so on. But I’m hoping I might be able to stock up on these once a month since they aren’t perishable. Farm Direct also seems very open to new suggestions so I might put in a request for cottage cheese in case that’s something they can work on…

I was a guest of the Malaysia Tourist Board, which won Gold for its rainforest-inspired garden, designed by James Wong (off the Grow Your Own Drugs programme on TV).

The garden was really beautiful, with square stone slabs like stepping-stones on a shallow lake, and shiny foliage of different greens, shapes and textures.

I heard a few visitors grumble that there weren’t actually any flowers, but I loved it – much more to my taste than rows of rhodedendrons or pots of pansies.

A soundtrack of bird and animal noises played softly in the background and it was so relaxing I almost fell asleep on the Minister of
Tourism.

Dato Sri Dr Ng Yen Yen, the minister, told me all about the flowers in her own garden, and about the government’s plan to create a Malaysian version of the Royal Horticultural Society, to get more Malaysians involved in and excited by gardening.

I also had an interesting chat with James himself, about how gardeners often tend to want to grow species from far-away places, instead of appreciating what grows in their ‘own back yard’.

“When I was growing up in Malaysia, all I wanted to do was grow English roses and a perfect striped lawn,” he says. “They’d struggle against the climate. It’s only recently that Malaysians are realising there are so many things around them that are more beautiful than any rose. I hope we’ve shown that our normal plants can win gold on the world stage.”

This got me thinking about the impact of flying and shipping plants and trees from one side of the world to the other to make our gardens look pretty.  There’s often talk about ‘food miles’ but what about ‘plant miles’?

My other favourite gardens at the show included the Global Stone Bee-Friendly Garden, which had a giant message reminding visitors of Albert Einstein’s prophecy that ‘when the last bee disappears off the face of the earth, man only has four years to live” (see my earlier feature on the decline of the honey bee).

I also loved Bradstone Biodiversity Garden which had insect-friendly flowers and log-piles, and a stone pavilion with crevices for nesting birds and bamboo canes to house insects.

The Eden Project garden was huge, if a little bonkers, with rows of old washing machine doors. It did well in the competition but I wasn’t sure if buying the biggest plot of the Show might have anything to do with it.

I was also fascinated by the Naturally Norway garden which was promoting the use of kebony instead of tropical timber for decking and pavilions. Kebony is made using the byproducts of sugar-cane production to harden sustainable wood species like pine and maple, and it looked stunning.

I wasn’t convinced by the Daily Telegraph garden, which seemed to have gone for the overgrown, disused railway track look. I didn’t find it particularly, beautiful, relaxing or interesting but I must have missed the point as it was the overall winner for 2010. Shows what I know…..

Survey results released this week as part of National Ferry Fortnight (organised by the Passenger Shipping Association) reveal why passengers choose to travel by ferry instead of flying.

The convenience of taking their own car came out top, with 55% saying this was an important factor. The lack of luggage restrictions (i.e. the convenience of piling your car high with buckets and spades) was very important for 44% of passengers. I presume the Passenger Shipping Association didn’t have any green travellers onboard that day, as carbon footprint wasn’t mentioned at all!

This got me thinking about the convenience of travelling by ferry as a foot passenger and – since I’ve just visited Jersey and Guernsey – travelling from Poole to the Channel Islands in particular.

Car-free on the Channel Islands

It’s fairly easy to go car-free once you’ve reached the Channel Islands. The ferry terminals on both islands are a short walk from the town centre so you can easily hop onto a bus; there are comprehensive bus routes and timetables online for both Jersey and Guernsey. There are also bike hire centres just a few minutes walk from the ferry terminals on both islands, like Zebra Hire on the Esplanade in St Helier, Jersey.

My experience onboard both Condor Vitesse and Condor Express was excellent: both clean and fresh, with a small duty free shop, a kids’ room with TV, and a cafeteria. There were all the usual comforts of ferry travel over air travel, but travelling to and between the Channel Isles was a particular treat in terms of scenery – as we came into Guernsey’s St Peter Port at 7pm it was like a sunset island cruise.

The terminal on Jersey was impressive, with a good little restaurant, outdoor seating, and a souvenir shop/newsagent before you pass through security. Guernsey was less developed -  the shutters of the snack kiosk remained resolutely down the whole time we were waiting so we couldn’t even buy a drink. Still, playing pool while we waited was a novelty.

The most frustrating part of the journey as a foot passenger, however, was not on the islands but in Poole on the mainland. The transfer from Poole train station to Poole ferry terminal was a 20-25 minute walk which was no fun with heavy luggage and a short time-frame. We ended up having to jump in a taxi across town instead, costing an extra £7 and adding to the rush-hour traffic across the city.

Poole can’t help the fact that its station and ferry terminal are not closer together, but in Southampton they get around the problem by providing a free shuttle bus from Southampton Central train station to Red Funnel’s Town Quay ferry terminal.

I’d like to see the authorities in Poole show a similar commitment to helping people reach the Channel Islands car free.

Ferry travel may well be the convenient choice for those travelling by car – but how about making it easier for those of us who want to go on foot?

Along with Pimms and Wimbledon, the British strawberry is something to really look forward to in summer. When they come into the supermarkets, I can’t bear to leave them on the shelves.

But the report says that farmers in Britain use energy-intensive, heated greenhouses to grow their strawberries, while in sunny Spain they can be grown without. Getting the strawberries to the UK from Spain does create carbon emissions, but still not equal to the energy which we put into growing them here.

It was news to me that we even use greenhouses for strawberries in the UK. They seemed to grow perfectly well in fields when I used to go strawberry picking/eating as a kid. When did the temperature-controlled greenhouse get involved?

Foreign strawberries don’t taste half as good as ours, so I refuse to buy Spanish instead. There must be some British strawberries on the market which have been grown less intensively, and without the need for heat? It might be tricky to track them down, short of growing them myself, and I haven’t been fantastically successful with growing stuff in the past. A farmers’ market, perhaps?

Another worrying comparison highlighted in the article:

“If transport is taken out of the equation, lamb from New Zealand is a more sustainable choice than that farmed in Britain – with less energy used for farming in a climate where there is less need for feed supplements and heated farm buildings.”

But do lambs really live in heated buildings? Surely they live on hills in the fresh air with the grown-up sheep?

Again, I imagine it’s a matter of farming intensity. If I stick to organic, sustainable lamb, it is less likely to have been produced in an energy-intensive way than cheap lamb.

The report’s conclusion seems confused at the moment, but Defra will apparently recommend new food production policies later this year. In the meantime, I’ll continue to try to scrape together the money for locally-sourced, sustainably-grown, ethically-sound, overly-expensive lamb when I can….

I think it’s a really great campaign – something everyone can achieve with little effort – and I have gone meat-free again today.

The difference that reducing meat consumption can make is staggering. The main factor is deforestation in Brazil for grazing. The Food and Agriculture Council of the United Nations said in 2006 that livestock’s contribution to gaseous emissions and climate change “currently amounts to 18 per cent of the global warming effect – an even larger contribution than the transportation sector worldwide” (read the whole report here).

Farmers inevitably hit back at the ‘meat free’ campaign, calling it gimmicky and ill-informed. I have to admit, I felt this blog on the Farmer’s Weekly’s site made a valid point:

“A campaign like this is likely to strike a chord with the sort of middle-class folks who buy higher-quality meat.  The kind of people who eat cheap and intensively-farmed protein from the freezer cabinets (the sort of people who wear a tracksuit even when they are not doing sport) are likely to be unmoved by the argument.  Their meat is normally the cheap and yucky imported stuff, I don’t see these sales being dented by the campaign.”

And surely everyone avoiding meat on the same day of the week could increase food waste, with meat close to its sell-by date not being purchased that day? Treehugger founder Graham Hill has a ‘weekday vegetarian’ suggestion where meat is saved for the weekend, which is interesting.

My repertoire of protein-rich vegetarian dishes is pretty narrow. I love seafood but that’s hardly straight-foward either (I still need to see The End of The Line about depleting fish stocks – it sounds harrowing).

So I’m setting myself a challenge to experiment more with vegetarian and vegan cuisine…any suggestions for any cheap, tasty vegan options?

There’s a massive range of carbon calculating websites and companies - some are in it for the money and some are not-for-proft. Some are very simplistic, and others are so complicated the polar caps will have melted by the time you fill in all the boxes.

I decided to make the government’s ‘Act on CO2′ calculator my first port of call. According to this:

• CO2 emitted by my home and lighting is: 0.75 tonnes per year.
• CO2 emitted by my appliances is: 0.62 tonnes per year.
• Travel was a tricky one. You have to enter which flights you take each year, which is a vague way of calculating it – who goes to the same list of places every year? I put in a return flight to Brazil to get a long-haul flight into my calculation. Based on this, CO2 emitted by my travel is: 2.19 tonnes.

Excluding all the travel I do for work, my footprint is therefore 3.55 tonnes per year, which is the same amount as boiling water for 204,342 cups of tea apparently.  The national average is 4.46 tonnes. I’m over average on Travel, but well under average on ‘Home’.

My carbon footprint compared to national average

I’m smug to hear I’m doing well on household appliances but I know that with the amount of travelling I do for work, the purple bar on my graph would be off the scale. This calculator also fails to take into consideration the food and other products you buy, and how much you recycle and so on, so is extremely basic.

Next, I’m going to give the WWF calculator a try. The questions are quite different – this one takes into consideration how much meat and fish you eat, whether you’ve bought many new appliances in the last year, and what you recycle. Still excluding any business travel, WWF says my footprint is 14.72 tonnes per annum – rather different to the government’s 3.55 tonnes!

My footprint according to WWF

I’m also carrying on as if we had 3.13 planets to support us. Ooops.

A great thing about the WWF calculator is that you can keep updating your entry data to monitor the difference you’re making to your footprint. There’s some good tips on there too so I’m going to set to work on my 14.72 tonnes.