A walk through Gaza: One meal, one glass of water, one human story

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Guest blog by Farah Hassan

I invite you to spend one hour with me in your imagination. Walk beside me through the streets of Gaza. Feel the heat of the day, hear the voices of people around you, and see the small details of life that often disappear behind the headlines.

My name is Farah Hassan, and this is not just a story about a place. It is a story about people — about families who wake up every morning trying to find the things that every human being deserves: food, water, safety, and dignity.

If you walked with me today, our first question would not be where we want to go, but where we can find what we need.

Buying food in Gaza is no longer a simple daily task. It has become a journey filled with waiting, searching, and difficult choices.

Let me take you with me on my last trip to buy food.

The road to the shop was long. As we walked, we could see people carrying bags, children moving through the streets, and families searching for basic supplies. Everyone seemed to be carrying a story of their own.

The sun was strong, and the heat followed us along the road. When we reached the shop, it was crowded. People were standing close together, asking about prices and looking for whatever was available.

Inside the shop, the air was warm and the place was filled with voices. A mother was trying to choose food for her children. An elderly man was counting the money in his hand before buying what he could afford. A shopkeeper was answering questions about prices and explaining what was available.

Everyone was making careful decisions. Nobody was buying extra things. People were choosing only what they needed because every amount of money mattered.

I went to buy simple ingredients for a meal for my family. I bought rice and a chicken breast, but even these basic items cost around $32. That didn’t include the other ingredients we needed, like spices and the wood we use for cooking.

Not everyone in Gaza can afford to buy everything they need. Prices are very high, and many families have to choose between necessities because their money is not enough to cover everything.

When I carried these items home, I thought about how a simple meal had become a difficult task. In the past, buying rice and chicken was something ordinary. Today, every ingredient has to be carefully considered, and every dollar counts.

At home, I started preparing the meal using the resources available to us. Cooking is no longer just about making food; it has become another challenge.

Because fuel for cooking is not always available, lighting a fire can take a long time. While I was trying to cook, the fire kept going out because there was not enough wood. Smoke filled the room, and I sat there trying again and again while my eyes were streaming from the smoke. But I continued because preparing a meal for my family was what I had to do.

That moment made me realize how much life has changed. Things that were once simple — buying food, lighting a fire, and preparing a meal — have become struggles that require patience and strength.

The smell of the rice and chicken filled the room, but behind this simple meal was a story of searching, waiting, and trying to survive.

After preparing the meal, it was just my husband and me sitting together. We sat in our small space at home, sharing the food we had worked hard to prepare.

The meal was simple — rice and chicken — but to us it was much more than just food. It was a moment of peace in the middle of a difficult life. We sat together, talking about our day, the challenges we faced, and hoping for better days ahead.

We did not talk only about the difficulties. We also tried to find moments of comfort, to laugh a little, and to remind each other that we were still together despite everything happening around us.

Looking at that simple meal, I thought about how things that once seemed ordinary had become precious. A meal with my husband, sitting together for a short time, and sharing what we had became a memory worth holding on to.

A meal that might seem ordinary to someone else carries a much deeper meaning for us. It represents effort, patience, and the hope that tomorrow will be better.

Water is another part of our daily reality. If you walked with me through Gaza, you would see people waiting for water, carrying containers, and trying to secure clean water for their families. Something as simple as a glass of water has become something people deeply appreciate.

But if you spent this hour with me, you would also see something else.

You would see kindness.

You would see neighbors sharing what they have. You would see families supporting each other. You would see people refusing to lose their humanity despite everything they have experienced.

And on Fridays, you would witness another powerful scene.

Many mosques in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, but people still gather to pray. They stand in the streets and among the rubble, beneath the open sky, and perform the Friday prayer.

The broken stones around them tell a story of loss, but their prayers tell a story of hope. The buildings may fall, but the faith and spirit of people remain.

Gaza is not only a story of destruction. It is a story of people who continue to live, love, help each other, and dream.

I wanted you to spend this hour with me because numbers and headlines cannot tell the whole story. Behind every meal, every drop of water, every step to a shop, and every prayer among the ruins, there is a human being with feelings, memories, and hope.

This is Gaza. This is my story. And this is the story of many people who are still holding on to life.

Farah Hassan writes professionally as Farah Rebhy, and she’s on Instagram. If you enjoyed this post, please contribute to her fundraiser – paid work is scarce in Gaza’s shattered economy and she will be very grateful!

people with a tray of seedlings

Growing food in Gaza: aid as resistance

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It was a sobering moment when in the summer of 2025, famine was declared in parts of Gaza. This is a fertile region with a strong agricultural heritage, once a major exporter of oranges and olives, with a strong horticulture sector, extensive glasshouses and arable lands.

But the recent war has put an end to that. Aerial photography shows how farming has been devastated. The UN reported in October 2025 that only 4% of farmland was in good condition and accessible, and in some areas, over half the population depends on humanitarian aid for food.

Food imports to Gaza meanwhile are restricted. Food crosses the border only in limited amounts, meaning that prices are very high, and what is allowed through does not make for a balanced diet. Protein and fresh produce are scarce, with disproportionate quantities of luxury items like sweets and biscuits.

The challenge of food distribution

Against this very challenging backdrop, two projects who are doing what they can to maintain Gaza’s food system recently took part in an online workshop for Welsh food activists, and you can watch it here.

Hala Sabbah, who is based in London, is one of the three Palestinian founders of the Sameer Project, a mutual aid initiative which for two years has been collecting donations and sending them to Gaza. Employing a team who work on the ground and know the area well, they use the funds to buy goods commercially within the Strip and make them available to the people most in need: water, food, tents, medical supplies and much else.

Their food work centres on a kitchen in Gaza City, which can supply 3000 meals a day and makes a point of cooking food that people will enjoy, bringing dignity and good nutrition to people on the edge of survival.

But their vision goes further than putting food on tables and responding to crisis. They hold a vision of a sustainable and thriving society in Gaza, and that is the basis of their partnership with the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature, APN. The goal is not just food security – having enough of the right sort of food, at affordable prices – but food sovereignty, a whole system of production and distribution that serves communities and is chosen by them.

Growing food under occupation

APN’s Lisa Shahin, who is based in Jordan, explains how they started with a group of agricultural engineers in 2000 during the second Intifada. A voluntary organisation supported by donations from around the world, APN has a long history of championing farmers in Palestine, standing for them through successive crises and putting them at the heart of the food system.

Their work is very varied. They have built water tanks and greenhouses and they have supplied inputs from fishing nets and sheep, to seeds, tree seedlings and beehives. They have responded to the destruction of olive groves with the slogan “uproot one, plant ten” all in the name of supporting Palestinians to maintain their farming heritage and build a self-reliant nation.

In 2024 their campaign Revive Gaza’s Farmland began, with the aim of boosting food production “from the besieged farmer to the besieged family.” This has included support for horticultural production, the restoration of wells, and the distribution of beehives and fruit trees. They have also started wheat growing and produced training materials on seed saving.

Given the challenges of joining up the components of a food system, which often have different priorities, it was particularly interesting to hear Hala and Lisa talk about their collaboration, which works as well as it does because of their shared values.

“We both are doing aid as resistance, we both do our work with the vision of the liberation of Palestine and we both don’t take money from governments,” says Hala, explaining how they first talked to APN about rebuilding the food system in Gaza after the February 2025 ceasefire. They were unable to realise this ambition because of the return of hostilities, but they continued to do small projects together when they could.

“What’s special about APN is that they’ve had this relationship for decades. It’s not like they just started working in Gaza during the genocide, they have been doing this work for a very long time, so they understand the context, they have a team there,” says Hala.

Lisa in turn values the importance of working directly and creatively with communities, bypassing the restrictions that aid agencies face.

“Throughout the past two years, not a single seed has entered into Gaza, not a single water pipe has entered,” she says. “Initiatives like the Sameer Project who are working directly with the communities, procuring locally from the inside, finding a way around all the obstacles, this is what matters. Sameer are very diverse and they are always responding to an actual need on the ground.”

The two organisations are determined to continue their work in the face of difficulties, inspired by a vision of a free Palestine. Sameer for instance has seen donations drop since last year’s ceasefire, and needs to raise more funding so it can run its kitchen at full capacity. Lisa quotes the FAO estimate of at least 6000 dunams (600 ha) of cultivatable land in Gaza and thinks they could produce 30 million kg of fresh produce in a year, making a significant contribution to nutrition.

There are parallels as well as big differences between Wales and Gaza. Community is community, and there are many people here who are feeding people who are hungry, growing more food in ecologically sound ways, and maintaining our agricultural heritage. If by raising both funding and awareness we can contribute towards the development of a healthy food system in Gaza, we can gain inspiration for our own work.

A group in Wales is setting up a link to raise money for food and farming in Gaza, and also to share stories and learning. Read more about Palestine Cymru Food Solidarity. You can make your donation here.

Images: Sameer Project and APN.

Water, wells and the flow of mercy in Palestine

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In an enigmatic story from the New Testament, Jesus meets a woman at a well in Samaria. It’s midday, it’s hot, and he asks her for a drink of water. Then he tells her that he can offer her something much better: the water of eternal life, after which she will never thirst again. She is sceptical, they debate, but she does indeed receive some insight that transforms her life and sends her away rejoicing.

The Samaritan woman sharing water at the well, sculpture at Chester Cathedral

The story touches on the relationship between material reality and the meaning that lies beneath. There is an unseen quality that flows through human societies, purifying and renewing them, like crystal waters that flow underground and then emerge from a well. It has many names – mercy, compassion, wisdom, truth, love – and although it is not mentioned much in public administration, we know when it is absent.

The way we use water reflects the spiritual health of a society. A nation that fouls its rivers and coastlines, as Britain does, must be sick in heart and mind. And imbalances in power distort its flow. In Wales, one of the great symbols of the unequal relationship with England is the flooding of the Tryweryn valley to create a reservoir for an English city. In the Middle East, the fight is over underground aquifers.

Samaria – home also of the Good Samaritan – is now part of the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967. Rain that falls here drains into an aquifer which extends into Israel, and it is contested, as the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine describes. Israeli settlers and soldiers have destroyed wells, tanks and pipelines, disrupting agriculture and driving Palestinians off the land. The situation is even more acute in Gaza, where the infrastructure to distribute water has been destroyed by the war.

About 60% of water here comes from boreholes sunk into the Gaza Coastal Aquifer, which has its own problems. Over-extraction has sucked in seawater, and contamination with sewage and agricultural runoff makes it unfit to drink. The remaining water comes from desalination plants (the Sameer Project is fundraising for one) or is piped in from Israel. The UN reported on 25 May that 74% of households were travelling to over 2000 collection points for their supplies, from which 24,000 cubic metres per day was distributed by 54 partners. It is an unsatisfactory arrangement with devastating impacts on public health.

a composite image of a borehole, pump and pipe
Commissioning a borehole in Gaza

A story from one corner of Gaza shows how ordinary people are affected. Khaled, one of a team of volunteers who manage the affairs of a community of 42 families, explains how they used to depend on a set of communal taps linked to a borehole, until a breakdown in community relations upended their lives.

“Our supply was always shared with many families. It would stop for periods, especially when demand was high or there were technical issues, so people had to store what they could, and the pressure was often low too. The quality was also not always reliable, so for drinking we had to be careful. But despite these challenges, it was something we had adapted to.”

Over time though, the neighbouring community who had control over the water supply began to restrict its use, eventually cutting them off altogether.

“It wasn’t driven by hostility, but by fear and shortage. Each group was trying to protect their own families with what little was available. But for us, it meant losing a vital part of daily life almost overnight.”

It was a shock and the community had to adjust quickly. For washing, there was the sea. For drinking though, they had to walk long distances with containers to reach distribution points.

“It was tiring and difficult, especially for children and older people. We had to ration carefully, using only what was necessary for drinking and cooking. People had to reduce personal washing to the minimum. Bathing became rare, clothes and bedding could not be cleaned properly, and shared living spaces became harder to keep sanitary.”

When people cannot wash their hands regularly, clean wounds, or maintain basic hygiene, infections move quickly, especially among children. Those who were already weak became more vulnerable, and recovery took longer. Dehydration was another problem, leaving people weak and struggling to cope with heat.

But the more insidious effect was on morale. Not being able to wash or put on clean clothes strikes at human dignity, and the disruption to daily routines put a strain on a community already living in dangerous conditions and dealing with terrible loss. It destabilized the delicate balance of human relations, showing up for instance as risk-taking, as people ventured into dangerous areas looking for water. At other times, the response was an uneasy silence born of fatigue and depression.

“The lack of water was not just an inconvenience. It affected the whole system of well-being. Daily life became organised around finding and conserving water, which affected everything else we were trying to do.”

The only way out was to sink their own borehole. This meant finding a suitable site amongst the rubble and then hiring equipment. This was not easy, as the blockade restricts the imports of spare parts, consumables and lubricants. Khaled and his team had to raise thousands of dollars from their international network of supporters and also to make painful economies at home. During the anxious week it took to prepare, everyone had to miss meals, even the children.

Finally one morning they had a borehole reaching down tens of metres into the aquifer, and it was time to attach the pump, powered by a generator. A crowd gathered to watch the big moment.

It was a crushing blow when the generator overheated and exploded. Children cried with the shock, echoing the dismay and disbelief of the adults. “It was like Allah had forsaken us,” said Khaled. “We starved ourselves to get that borehole, but we went from one bad situation to another.”

Now, not only did they still have no water supply, but they had lost their main source of electrical power, which they depended on for charging phones and computers. It was a glimpse into the abyss. But they carried on. An engineer was called and a second round of fundraising began, even more fraught with anxiety.

“I was afraid that if we couldn’t repair the generator quickly, the community would go on the rampage and families would start turning on each other,” said Khaled, voicing the ever-present fear that at some point the struggle to survive in the face of insuperable odds will become too much, that the bonds of community have their limit.

Four days later, though, it was done. To general rejoicing, water gushed out of a pipe into the waiting buckets and containers. Normality had returned, such as it was. They still try to find other sources for drinking water, but they can at least wash and clean with it, and the fact of having their own supply brings back a confidence that had been severely tested.

The situation across Gaza remains dire, and the only hope for restoring proper water supplies is wholesale reconstruction, which depends in turn on a stalled peace process. It can feel like the human divisions run deeper than the aquifers.

But the two people at the well in Samaria were also speaking across a divide. Jews and Samaritans were neighbours who shared religious roots but worshipped at rival sites and kept apart from each other, and the woman appears to have been a social outcast into the bargain. Nevertheless, they opened up a channel for human connection, through which joy and hope could flow. It is always possible.

The Sameer Project is fundraising for a desalination plant in Gaza. Please support them here.

people walking past wrecked buildings

Food security, lessons from Gaza

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Somewhere in the southern end of Gaza, a community of 42 families is spending their second winter under canvas. Outside the reach of aid agencies, they rely largely on donations from friends and families overseas, and strangers who donate to their crowdfunder. There is never enough for what they need – food, tents, hygiene supplies, medical care – and the overcrowding, cold and wet make survival a daily challenge that is hard for most of us to imagine.

So when recently the truck that was bringing them a food delivery was attacked and turned back, it was a disaster. A shipment of flour, rice, cooking oil, potatoes and onions which was supposed to last three weeks was gone, with no prospect of a refund. The team of seven who support the community, making daily rounds and coordinating supplies, were forced to scrape together what funds they could and buy emergency supplies on the black market.

Getting food on the table in Gaza. Food supplies to the area are restricted by the blockade, and protein and fresh produce are particularly scarce

Trading from broken down shop premises and warehouses, an informal network of suppliers buy stocks when they can and sell them on at inflated prices, several times higher than they should be. Because the banking system barely functions payment is often in USDT, a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar, which is also how they receive funds from overseas. It’s an irregular system, but it means that the community can eat for a day or two at a time, while waiting for more funds to arrive.

It wasn’t enough, of course, and in the aftermath of the truck attack food supplies regularly gave out completely. For Khaled, a photographer by profession but now volunteering full time for the organising team, being unable to feed children who are crying with hunger is one of the hardest things to bear.

“When regular food supply chains break down, it feels like losing the life savings of an entire community all at once. Everything people depend on disappears, not just food, but stability, dignity, and any sense of security. It is a slow, painful collapse that affects everyone, especially the children.”

A few weeks later, things became much darker when a member of the team was stabbed and robbed on his way back to the camp with food. Not only did they lose vital supplies, but they were now obliged to spend scarce funds on hospital bills. With even less to go round, tensions began to erupt, and the community felt noticeably less safe.

“When formal systems collapse, communities fall back on whatever social infrastructure already exists – family ties, neighbourhood relationships, informal leaders, shared norms of reciprocity,” Khaled explains. “But when things stop working and people feel there is no stability or support, it becomes very easy for people to turn on each other.”

The team are feeling the pressure. All they can do is to double down on their attempts to raise funds for a new bulk order, and to maintain a dignified and fair system of distribution. That means communal cooking to provide meals for the most vulnerable, and boxes of essential foods to distribute to the families.

“Nothing here is anonymous or distant. You see the faces of the people you are helping. You see who eats and who doesn’t,” he says. “This is not a system. It is a series of human relationships under pressure, adapting day by day to scarcity.“

It is a tragic situation. But it is also an inspiring story of human resilience and the determination to maintain dignity under awful circumstances. Somehow they just keep going, and here is the lesson for us. As the global scene becomes more and more chaotic and we start to feel the shocks in the rising cost of living, their story can wake us up to what is at stake, and prompt us to get behind the values of cooperation and care that are the basis of peace.

It is mutual aid that keeps Khaled’s community going – both the self-sacrificing care that members show for each other, and the generosity of supporters around the world who want to alleviate the pain that they see on their phone screens and televisions. Mutual aid is by its nature informal and personal, individuals sharing their lives in letters and gifts, perhaps through organised programmes such as Gaza Champions or by chance encounters on social media.

It can however also be large-scale, as in the case of The Sameer Project, where a few Palestinian exiles have raised millions to fund a team of 150 workers in Gaza who know their communities well and can make sure that food, water, tents, winter clothing, medical care and companionship reach those most in need. Donations come from individuals and solidarity groups, and they run a social media campaign that shares news on the ground and emphasises individual stories.

To the extent that these connections are direct and personal, they are transformative. It isn’t just that people in Gaza are encouraged to know that strangers care about them and are willing to help. The people who donate and see the difference that it makes develop greater confidence in their capacity to contribute to the well-being of others – something we all need. They find their agency, and this benefits their home communities as well.

This is crucial, because global humanity needs to find its determination to create a better future. If we are to have a healthy, compassionate and wise society, not one cowed by extractive corporations, misinformation and greed, then we need to choose and act accordingly. We especially need opportunities for practical projects that bring us together in service and gratitude, allowing us build a shared positive vision and form the teams that will do the work.

Gaza holds special relevance for us because of our historic and religious connection with the area, giving us an many opportunities to engage and learn. Our situation in Wales is of course very easy in comparison, but for much of our history life was harder, and at some level we know that food security could become a concern for us too, as geopolitics unsettles our comfortable world. How would we cope?

Tim Lang’s Just in Case report on food security in the UK spells out just how unprepared we would be for a shock to our food supplies. Behind the scenes, our governments do consider how we would respond to threats such as cyber-attacks on supermarkets, storms and power outages, all of which have of course happened in recent years. Many of us know how reliant we are on imports, how little food is stored for emergencies, and how vulnerable we are to short term threats.

However, it is one thing to be vaguely aware of this, and quite another to look it in the face. At a recent conference on food security in rural Wales led by the Dyfed Powys Food Resilience Project (who are holding a summit on 16 March), we considered scenarios where a community or a local authority has to deal with a sudden collapse in food supplies. How would we organise ourselves so that there was enough to go round, how would we identify the people most in need, how would we deal with panic buying?

It became clear that we have work to do if we are to create a society that can respond to such challenges with dignity and not live ‘nine meals away from anarchy’. The rudiments are already here. We do after all have people who are homeless, cold and hungry now, and we have a network of food banks, community kitchens and gardens that can help. Then there are visionary initiatives such as Our Food Trust in Powys who are rising to the challenge of ‘making food security happen‘ by setting young people up to grow vegetables on small farms. We just need the imagination to scale this up and make it a priority.

We could learn from the communities of Gaza. They are practising what in Wales we have been calling the ‘well-being economy’, and what Build Palestine calls the ‘solidarity economy’, one rooted in care and dignity. If we start supporting and learning from them, as well as getting behind food projects here at home, then we can have the satisfaction of knowing that we are doing something to protect the world from the storms that may be coming our way.

A group of people who came together at last year’s Wales Real Food and Farming Conference is talking to the Sameer Project about a fundraising collaboration based around food and farming. Please come to our webinar on Wednesday 6 May if you are interested: book here. You can donate to the Sameer Project here.

Wales, Israel and Palestine: our connection to the land

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The village next to ours, Salem, is named after the chapel built in the 1820s for a once vibrant farming and mining community. From the same root as the Hebrew Shalom and Arabic Salaam, the name also carries associations with Jerusalem, or to give it its Welsh name, Caersalem. The Stronghold of Peace.

Not far away are Moriah (the hill at Jerusalem where Solomon built his temple), Pisgah (the hills east of the Jordan from which Moses caught a glimpse of the Promised Land) and Capel Seion (or Zion). And all over Wales there are dozens of villages with unlikely Middle Eastern names, from Bethlehem and Bethania to Horeb and Nebo.

They bear witness to a time when Wales was a religious nation, and not simply Christian, but deeply identified with the Israelites of the Old Testament. The Welsh found inspiration in the idea that they too were a marginalised people travelling across the wilderness, ‘pilgrim through this barren land’ as the hymn has it, their eyes fixed on a distant horizon.

The Wales/Israel tradition goes back many centuries, as Catholic priest Dorian Llywelyn describes in his 1999 book, Sacred Place, Chosen People. Since then, Wales-based Jewish writer Jasmine Donahaye has examined the relationship from a more political perspective in Whose People: Wales, Israel, Palestine. And because it was under Welsh prime minister and Christian Zionist Lloyd George that the Balfour Declaration was made, it is possible to draw a direct line between Wales and the tragedy that is unfolding in Gaza.

This line would pass through the years when the state of Israel was coming into being, reviving Hebrew as its national language. Inspired by the new state’s success in bringing immigrants up to fluency, and its confident nationhood, Wales adapted the Hebrew Ulpan immersion course as the Wlpan, familiar to so many Welsh learners and still going strong.

But things have changed in recent decades. Welsh sympathies, always with the margins, have moved to the Palestinians who were displaced by the new state. The Welsh Government has sent cash to Gaza and expressed support, while solidarity groups around the country have organised marches and fundraisers for the relief effort.

It is now the Palestinian flag that is everywhere to be seen, while the rich Jewish culture of Wales, linked to immigration during the industrial revolution, is declining. Islam, which has its own religious claim on the Holy Land as well as being the faith of most Palestinians, is now claimed by 2.2% of Welsh people in the 2021 census, again driven by immigration. Nearly half claimed no religion at all.

And yet the place names remain. Wales has covered itself in a blanket of meaning, pegged down at intervals by links to another land which most of us will never visit. It may seem quaint or even disturbing now, but it is too powerful and heartfelt simply to be dismissed as religious and political incorrectness. Perhaps it is due for reinterpretation.

Ultimately, it is about connection to land: the Jews with Israel, the Welsh with Wales – and the people now known as Palestinians with their ancestral lands. While that can be framed as ownership, a right to be fought over, in a deeper sense it points to the mysterious bonds between soil and society. The story of a journey to a Promised Land expresses the truth that land is sacred, or to put it in secular terms, it has its own integrity and the power to shape our lives. It calls us into a relationship with the soil, rivers and ecosystems that sustain life, inspiring care and respect.

Wales has developed a particularly strong reverence for locality, expressed by terms like cynefin (or rootedness) and milltir sgwar (the square mile in which we conduct our daily lives, or used to). Poets and writers have celebrated the weaving together of a particular people with a particular place, refuting the interchangeability that comes with a global consciousness and celebrating the culture of the local. Farming of course is central to that, as Carwyn Graves has shown in Tir. This sentiment has found a natural resonance in the Bible story of the Israelites, but both could be seen as an expression of a universal truth: all people have a home on this earth, and we should welcome the stranger.

The Old Testament at its best held a vision for the peaceful coexistence of peoples. It was Isaiah who spoke of beating swords into ploughshares, while prophets like Amos and Hosea regularly called for justice and mercy in social affairs. The Welsh tradition of pacifism and internationalism has its roots in the same nonconformity which built the chapels.

Now there are aspirations for Wales to be known as a nation of peace. That will certainly give us some work to do. When Wales chose to link its destiny with this piece of land at the east of the Mediterranean, it entered into a relationship – mainly but not entirely of the imagination – which makes demands on us. How do we make good on this, and serve peace in the Middle East?

Perhaps we might start by dropping the idea of a ‘chosen people’ and concentrate instead on ‘sacred land’. Then the question becomes, how might the land of Israel and Palestine be healed and support a thriving society? This would mean moving the emphasis away from the apportioning of blame, and recognizing that everyone concerned is living out a conflict that has causes beyond ordinary human reckoning. These include geopolitical forces linked to oil and trade routes, ultimately concerned with preserving a modern way of life which is already known to be unsustainable.

A powerful call to Western peacemakers comes from a TED dialogue between American-Israeli Ami Dar and Palestinian Ali Abu Awwad shortly after the Hamas attack of October 2023. Don’t side with Palestine, they say, don’t side with Israel. Don’t fuel the outrage on either side. Instead, hold a space for a better future where 7 million Israelis and 7 million Palestinians live together respectfully. This means trusting them to work it out – a big ask, it might seem, but surely the only true solution.

Meanwhile, back to the land. One of the most shocking acts of the recent war was the destruction of the Palestinian seedbank at Hebron. Shocking, because seeds adapted to local conditions are the very stuff of the connection between people and land, the source of life itself, beyond nationality. Damage to the Palestinian food system is further described in this petition. And one step up from the land, food aid is still not arriving in the quantities that are needed, a gap that is being filled by mutual aid.

The conflict in Gaza has struck a deep nerve in Wales, and elsewhere, surely in large part for cultural reasons. The Holy Land was the origin of religious movements which have shaped our culture and you don’t have to be Welsh to understand the symbolism of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. But it is also a present-day mirror for us. We too are disconnected from the land in the sense that we have forgotten our dependency on it and stopped caring for it. We too are a divided and unequal society with rifts to heal.  

Sometimes it is easier to see a problem when it plays out in another country. We should certainly do what we can to help in Israel and Palestine, given our hand in creating the situation and because we live in an interconnected world. But we should do it humbly, not presuming to know the answers, and in the spirit of a shared exploration of what it means to be humans living on the earth. Then we must put our own house (and garden) in order.

The chapel at Salem stands empty now and is being sold. The windows are broken and ivy is climbing in, but there is a still a Bible on the lectern and a sense of human presence lingers. This building held the hopes and prayers of a small community. We too can only hope and pray for the wisdom to live better.

Following discussions at the recent Wales Real Food and Farming Conference, a few of us are looking at ways to show support for food and farming in the region. Please get in touch here us if you are interested in this, and see the follow-up article Food security, lessons from Gaza.

Title changed and some small edits made, 5.12.2025. More small edits on 21.12.2025 and more on 27.01.2026

Moving on: from Food Manifesto Wales to CyFAN Cymru

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First published on the Food Manifesto Wales website, which is being closed after 10 years

Much has happened since we started the Food Manifesto website in 2015. Food is now well established in Welsh policy, as Food Sense Wales noted earlier this year: the Future Generations office has made food a priority, the government has produced a Community Food Strategy, and serious moves are afoot to supply school meals with organic vegetables. Meanwhile, the FFCC’s Food Conversations are mobilising citizens to shape food strategy, and county farms in Powys and Carmarthenshire are being re-purposed to grow vegetables. The Sustainable Farming Scheme has taken the place of EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, and nature restoration is widely supported, at least in theory. As poverty has intensified, community food initiatives have multiplied and food security is back on the agenda.

These changes have been driven – and followed – by many people and organisations, and it is this widely distributed support that gives the Welsh food movement its power. The Manifesto has been part of that, and it has been a joy to work with so many inspiring people, and see ideals turn into reality. Now as we formally close our website and move into a new phase, it’s time to look back on 10 years of our work and see how far we have come. What has our special contribution been, and what is needed next?

The Wales Food Manifesto was set up by a group of individuals following a conference in Cardiff to mark the end of a project called Food Values, which had been led by Organic Centre Wales (2000-2015, RIP). This brought together activists and academics to find out how people think about food – is it really just all about price? It turned out that people cared about much more. They wanted to see a world where everyone had enough to eat, where food was grown and prepared to high standards, and not wasted, and where children were given the skills to grow and cook together. Ultimately, food was seen as an expression of culture, love and connection.

The idea of the Manifesto was that it would be a set of principles that most people could agree on, whether they were in the food industry or feeding a family (or, of course, both), and which would draw people together across divides. It was also the year that the Well-being of Future Generations Act became law, and so it was natural to map our principles of the Manifesto onto the seven well-being goals. You can see our first draft here.

We built a website and used the Manifesto as a starting point for discussions at food festivals, conferences and community meals. It worked well to start conversations, and we found more and more resonance with work that was going on around Wales, to do with poverty, the environment, farming, food skills and other topics. It did indeed bring people together and articulate what was emerging in Wales, and elsewhere.

There is a limit to what a few individuals can achieve, though. We wondered if we should set up an organisation to hold the Manifesto, and with support from Sustain, RSPB and others, we held a few public meetings to test the water. The enthusiasm was certainly there, but the direction was not clear and so we paused. The website meanwhile became a vehicle to publish a wide range of articles on Welsh food, from beekeeping to nitrate management, from Wales’ role in tropical deforestation to food history. We published nearly 100 blog posts (this is number 98), as well as a Brexit briefing for the Food Research Collaboration.

It was in 2018 that a few of us who were regular attenders of the Oxford Real Farming Conference proposed a session on the Manifesto and the Welsh food movement. The ORFC wanted to encourage regional spin-offs of their popular event and wondered – would we like to use our slot to see if there would be interest in running one in Wales? We did, and there was.

And so in 2019 the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference was held for the first time in Aberystwyth, with Colin Tudge and Ruth West, founders of ORFC, as our guests. Led by people from Aberystwyth University, the RSPB, the Sustainable Food Trust, Organic Farmers and Growers, Garden Organic, Permaculture, Farming Connect and many other organisations, it was an immediate success. It has been held every year since then: twice online because of Covid, then at Lampeter, Ruthin and Lampeter again.

Now we are planning the seventh conference at Bridgend, taking it to South Wales in the run up to the 2026 Senedd election. It will be held on 19-21 November 2025 and will be a partnership with Food Sense Wales. This charity, which began around the same time as us, has done much to advance food system development in Wales, setting up the Food Policy Alliance Cymru and now running the local food partnerships which are tapping into the energy of ‘food citizens’ to drive change.

New organisation

The Conference may be an established event in the calendar, but  just like the Manifesto from which it arose, it still lacks a legal structure or secure funding. We never know from year to year who will organise it or how it will be financed – only that somehow, miraculously, people come forward. Operating on a shoestring is exhilarating but it does limit what is possible and place a strain on volunteers. And so now we are building a charity that will run the WRFFC and take over the legacy of the Manifesto.

We are calling it CyFAN Cymru. This stands for Cymuned Dros Fwyd, Amaeth a Natur, or Community for Food, Agriculture and Nature, with the added benefit that Cyfan is Welsh for ‘whole’, expressing the way that food brings all aspects of life together. The plan is that CyFAN Cymru will not only be a vehicle for the Conference but will build on it, with year-round events and publications. We have already held two online seminars and have ideas for more.

It has a website, www.cyfancymru.wales, and you can find us on LinkedIn as well. Please take a look and sign up for our newsletter. The Food Manifesto will be archived here and eventually absorbed into CyFAN Cymru.

We are also looking for more trustees to join our board, as we prepare our application to the Charity Commission. That means articulating what exactly we bring to the food movement. We know that people come to our conference year after year, and we get more session proposals than we can fit into the programme, but why exactly? Perhaps it is because, like the original Food Values project, we ask what it is that people care most deeply about and we stand for those values.

We bring together people who are doing what they believe in – on farms, in our communities, in our workplaces – and we nurture the vision that arises from that. Where there is conflict, we look for points of connection, valuing complexity. We value service and the wisdom that comes with years of experience, as the ground from which innovation arises. We provide a space for reflection in a world that invites us to rush from success to success. We see that we are ‘all in this together’ and we provide comfort for people who are struggling on their own. We build community without, we hope, being a clique.

To put it grandly, with the Conference we create people-centred spaces where the food movement, and wider society, can renew itself. Please come and join us at CyFAN Cymru.

Image: Aber Food Surplus is one of many community food projects that are bringing the concept of sustainable food for all on to the high street

Reflections on the sixth Wales Real Food and Farming Conference

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Originally posted on the WRFFC website here. I wasn’t on the committee this year so I had a good view of things.

This year was the sixth WRFFC, and what a long way we have come!  The structure has not changed much, although this year the addition of artists and a closing ceremony brought an extra dimension.  But as relationships have built over the years, and the sense of an interconnected food system has grown, so it has become clearer what the event can achieve.  Like a mushroom emerging periodically from an underground mycelium, it allows us to sound the depths while connecting with present challenges.

Extreme weather is one of those, and it struck on the first day.  Guest speaker Derek Walker, the Future Generations Commissioner had to call in from his car, and the party from Farms for City Children missed the session altogether.  Fortunately, another school group was able to bring their appearance forward and so we heard instead from Ysgol y Dderi, in nearby Llangybi.  As one of them said, describing a visit to nearby Bwlchwernen Fawr:

“While we were there, we met Patrick Holden and his sons who were busy harvesting organic carrots for schools in Carmarthenshire.  This made the children of Ysgol y Dderi very cross.  Why can’t we have Bwlchwernen carrots?”

Now, thanks to Castell Howell and Food Sense Wales’ Veg in Schools project, and a lot of letter-writing by the children, they are promised the carrots for their Christmas dinner.  Patrick Holden bounded on to the stage brandishing a bunch of carrots.

Ysgol y Dderi have been doing outstanding food education for many years and their headteacher Heini Thomas spoke at the WRFFC in 2022.  And she had helped organise an organic school meal as far back as 2003, for Ysgol Dihewyd, in the days of Organic Centre Wales and Antur Teifi.  The present project has roots in Food for Life, an initiative that was being talked about at the Soil Association’s conferences in Cirencester over 20 years ago.  We are in it for the long haul.

The Nature Friendly Farming Network has been a strong supporter of the event since we began in 2019, and they put on an inspiring session about farmer successes, to which Deputy First Minister Huw Irranca-Davies was a last-minute addition.  As the Sustainable Farming Scheme and the Community Food Strategy near their delivery dates and set the scene for the food system in Wales, let us hope that there is a good balance between inclusivity and high standards.

Ariel view of farmyard, buildings, fields and hedges.
Bremenda Isaf County Farm

Local Food Partnerships now cover all of Wales and are at various stages of development; Bwyd Sir Gar’s project to convert a county farm from dairy to vegetables (see image above) is an ambitious and symbolic step.  The Food Policy Alliance Cymru is leveraging this popular support to drive the call for a national Welsh food strategy.

But all this change is driven ultimately by human relationships, and it was guest speaker Denise Bentley of the First Love Foundation who brought that into focus on the second day.  As the Foundation’s website says, they “show empathy where there may not have been empathy previously”.  She was talking about the people who come to their advice centre in Tower Hamlets but the same applies to the conference.  Human connection makes things happen.

We also need to see ourselves as part of bigger systems, and recognise how poverty, poor diets and environmental destruction are not about individual failure as much as a society that is organised along the wrong lines.  For Denise, and also Pearl Costello of Food Cardiff responding to her talk, community food projects are about building the social structures and culture that can support a better food economy.  They are not the answer to food poverty, to which the solution is money, and the dignity that it brings.

As ever, much of the value of the conference was the conversations in between the sessions, and over food, which this year was a triumph of local and organic sourcing, thanks to chef Barny Haughton and University of Wales Trinity St David’s Kevin Hodson.  It’s in this social space that friendships are renewed, and random encounters reveal new possibilities.  It can also be a space for contemplation and sideways thinking, and Carreg Creative’s ‘Wrth wraidd – at root’ was a popular space for exploring unanswered questions through soil, vegetables, writing and talk.  And we can’t wait for ‘Food – the Musical!’ which started life in a workshop of that name.

Many sessions responded to the need to bring people together, in a world where algorithms drive us apart.  ‘Why farmers and ecologists need each other’ was one such, led by the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, and Cardiff University’s ‘creating spaces of learning across difference’ was another.  Discussions on agroecology explored how food, farming and society are all linked and must be considered as a whole, while other sessions looked at drawing more of the public into the food movement.

Another role of the conference is to shine a spotlight on knotty technical questions and look for creative solutions.  A session on the role of farm data in preparing for the Sustainable Farming Scheme was popular, while others examined the tensions between values-based farming and automation, the balance between conservation grazing and beef production, and the logistics of public procurement. It was new this year to have a closing ceremony.  Angharad Wynne invited us to set an intention for the following year and take a handful of wheat seed home with us to sow.  Our wishes were a mixture of the serious and the funny, the high-flown and the everyday, and all of it held lightly and with warmth.  When we sow the seeds next year, these intentions will become the crops we harvest, real or virtual.  Whether or not you attended our conference, may 2025 be a fulfilling year for all of us.

Image: Jeremy Moore.

An emerging culture: community gardens as spaces for social renewal

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Over the summer, a meeting in Aberystwyth brought together a dozen people from community gardens and related organisations to share news and ideas. One person set the tone when we introduced ourselves at the beginning: working in mental health, he said, he was new to the gardening scene but wanted to be part of what he called an ‘emerging culture’. A thrill of recognition ran around the circle.

A work session at Penglais Community Garden

It’s a good way of describing the combination of people, public spaces and gardening that is such a live phenomenon in recent years. As a recent report for the Ceredigion Local Food Partnership (download in English or yn Gymraeg) shows, these growing spaces bring together many things: food growing, wildlife, beauty, social connection, composting, technical knowledge, healthy eating, cooking and therapeutic activity. There is something for everyone.

More than this though, a community garden is a valuable public space. That is, it is somewhere where we can be a person rather than a consumer, and it’s quite normal to talk to strangers. Here there is no corporate branding, no advertising, no clocks or internet to hurry us along, no reminder of institutional control. We don’t have to buy a ticket or create a login to visit. Instead it’s a place where we can experience ourselves and each other as human beings living in the natural world and connect with something deeper.

Apparently, there are bacteria in soil that work like antidepressants when we get our hands in the earth. It’s good to think that nature is on the side of our brain chemistry, but it seems unnecessary. Green things growing, the open sky, a wriggling worm and a splash of ox-eye daisies bring joy anyway, and so does a friendly chat.

This then is the background to the ‘emerging culture’, which I think is worth a closer look. Penglais Community Garden at the university, the one I know best, has created a fluid but lasting community over the last ten years. We have students just learning to grow food, getting excited about their first pumpkins and the miracle that is composting: they collected an award earlier this year. We have university staff and local people who turn up regularly and who also manage the mailing lists, the watering rota and the cropping plans. Others come just a few times a year for a Saturday session, work hard and go away again.

Then there are the visitors. We’ve got to know individuals and families who call by regularly to see how things are doing, and met countless random people who spot something interesting behind the fruiting hedge and pop in – students, their parents, staff of all types, tourists. And there are many people we don’t get to meet, who maybe take their lunch to eat in the patio area or wander around the beds, and tell us later how much they enjoyed the space and maybe picked a few nasturtium leaves to liven up their sandwiches.

We do gardening in Welsh, we’ve hosted well-being sessions for staff and students, people have used us for art classes and picnics, and we’ve run the odd cropping experiment. This year we tried out the triffid-like south American crop achocha. We’ve had people referred by their community psychiatric nurses, who’ve come for a few sessions and left visibly relaxed and happier. Arts Centre kitchen staff have popped in to pick borage, nasturtium and marigold flowers for their salads, and we’ve sold our parsley at the Bwyd Dyfi Hub.

The garden is not without its problems: we have to be on our guard against the local rabbit population and we have a few mystery human visitors who take a bit more than we’d like. Sometimes our volunteer population falls away and the weeds get the upper hand. But we get by, and there’s always something to look forward to.

Recently we have been experimenting with composting food waste from the Arts Centre kitchen. It’s a great metaphor for what we do. Just as pasta and cabbage stalks rot down into rich compost, so the worries which volunteers bring are received and metabolised into labour that creates beauty. Work pressures on staff, threats of redundancy, student loneliness, health problems, the state of the world: all are held without judgement, and we go home with a handful of chard or tomatoes or parsley for our dinner.

Long may our community gardens live, and perhaps we could see even them as incubators for a new form of human culture.

Meanwhile, here are links to podcasts I’ve helped make over the past few years which I think show the ’emerging culture’ quite well:

  • one on Aberystwyth University’s WW2 Allotment at Penglais, discussing old and new gardening methods, heritage varieties and the social, spiritual and political power of community gardening
  • one on Trefechan Bridge Garden’s water harvesting project
  • and also, two years old now, Aber Food Connections, which features Aber Food Surplus, community gardens, apple pressing and the St Paul’s community meal.

And some videos, both in Welsh with subtitles:

  1. a celebration of community gardening in Ceredigion, linked to the National Eisteddfod in 2022, by Gwledda
  2. One about Penglais Community Garden, heritage seeds and volunteering, by PLANED

You can see a map of Ceredigion growing spaces here, and download the report.

Main picture: Plascrug growing spaces, where about 100 raised beds are let out by Aberystwyth town council.

Tir: a story to reconnect people and land

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In his earlier book Welsh Food Stories, Carwyn Graves took nine familiar foods, from cheese and salt to apples and bread, and traced their origins back through history, revealing a richness to our food culture that goes far beyond the cliches of Welsh cakes, cawl and laverbread.

Now, with Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape, he starts at the other end of the food chain, looking at land use and tracing how it has evolved since humans began to cultivate the soils of what is now Wales. He takes seven types of landscape and describes how the constraints of geology and climate have shaped their use, co-evolving with human society and culture.

Retaining the Welsh terms for their subtleties of meaning, he has chapters on coed (woodland), cloddiau (the plural of clawdd, a hedgerow or earth bank), cae (fields for grazing), ffridd (the shrubby area between hill and lowland), mynydd (‘mountain’, but also dry rough grazing), rhos (heath, wetter moor and bog) and perllan (orchards, with grazing). For each one he describes their development, delving into sources as diverse as archaeology, lives of the saints, monastery records, legal documents, poetry and interviews with people who remember the traditional methods.

This book is about science and geography as much as history. There was wisdom in the old ways which met human needs for food, timber, clothing, fuel, medicine and much else, while also supporting a rich wildlife. Much of this biodiversity is now tragically lost, along with the human communities that kept it all going. Fragments do remain however, such as the very few hay meadows to have escaped ‘improvement’ into ryegrass monoculture, and he meets farmers who do what they can to preserve them, as well as incomers who have reinvented traditional methods in the modern context.

The chapter on ffridd is particularly intriguing. This is the transitional zone between the intensively farmed lowland fields around the farm and the summer-grazed mountain in mid and north Wales. Often following the snowline and the springline, neither upland nor lowland, a mixture of grassland, trees and scrub, it has many agricultural functions, including early spring feed and shelter for lambs. It is also rich in wildlife; a 1980s study found that ffridd supported a higher density of tree pipits, yellowhammers, linnets, twites and whinchats than any other landscape in Wales. A liminal zone, celebrated in poetry but now obscured by government plantation of conifers and changes in farming practices, it has slipped away almost unnoticed.

Implied in this book is a powerful call for doing things differently. The past encodes a system of principles for living on the land which could give us a way through the crises that beset us now. But how do we do this? Is it even possible?

A vision of unity

Tir demonstrates through a multitude of examples the essential unity of farming and nature, people and land. In this it echoes David Elias’ book Shaping the Wild, which describes in fine-grained detail the shifting relationship between food production and wildlife on a single farm near Bala. Government policy attempts to fit them together again, but the forces of social change and global commerce work powerfully in the opposite direction, at least for now.

As we contemplate what we have lost, ideologies rip through the public consciousness like fire across a summer-scorched hillside, creating more heat than light. Rewilding is one, and it haunts the pages of the book; clearly it is intended as a refutation of the cruder forms of that approach, while sharing its vision for the return of wildlife. Decolonization and indigineity are others, and Graves is at pains not to compare the Welsh people with native Americans. Nor does he encourage Welsh exceptionalism, welcoming the contributions of many incomers. We are all in this together.

Instead he suggests an approach that finds meaning in the concrete and the particular. Start with this cae (a field for livestock, we learn, as opposed to a maes which would be ploughed, perhaps for cereals), that oak tree, those blackbirds: go outside and meet them, get to know them, as Dafydd ap Gwilym showed us back in the fourteenth century. Find out how to grow and gather a healthy and varied diet from the land, whether by farming, gardening, foraging or fishing, and put it into practice. Take inspiration from an old, unifying story of the human home which, while universal, does seem to be particularly strong in Wales, with its cynefin and hiraeth.

Sensitive territory

It will not be easy. This book probes deep cultural nerves, whether those of the native Welsh who feel variously grief and guilt for their lost language and culture, or incomers wondering whether they can ever truly belong. The modern sins of colonization, cultural appropriation and the commodification of culture loom large for tender consciences, while the tendency to blame and diagnose drives people apart, and there are hard practical problems like river pollution to solve.

On the positive side however, there is a growing understanding of the crisis of modernity and a determination to create something better, with many opportunities to be part of something good. Graves offers a story here in which everyone who cares about the Welsh countryside, wildlife and a just society can find themselves, facing the tough existential questions together.

This is the aim for instance of the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference, at which Graves last year chaired sessions on language, farming and wildlife, while others discussed topics such as community gardening, growing vegetables for school meals and beekeeping. It is also the spirit that runs through the organic movement, permaculture, agroecology and regenerative farming, as well as the local food partnerships supported by the Welsh Government and Graves’s own new project, Cegin y Bobl.

Others have been bringing a more direct approach to reviving traditional farming wisdom. Besides the many examples in Tir, I’m reminded of Eryri smallholder Chris Dixon’s fusion of Welsh farming patterns with the principles of Permaculture design (see his wonderful account of ffridd). In my own patch, the Dyfi Biosphere, the Tyfu Dyfi project is building on an earlier study of mixed farming in the area to revive the practice of growing vegetables on farms, once again putting farming at the centre of community life.

Tir is a call, all the more powerful for being implied rather than spelt out, for a realignment of our food system so that it works not just for the environment and our physical nourishment but our deepest spiritual needs as well. We don’t know what that will look like yet, but we have some pointers and it is never too late to try.

Creating new food traditions, or how we did a wassail

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It’s a cliché, but true nonetheless, that our society has lost contact with the land. In particular, we do not pay much attention to where our food comes from and forget that the natural world is crucial to our survival. Wildlife organisations do all they can to remind us of this fact, and there is an abundance of scientific evidence too, yet somehow it bypasses our consciousness. Witness the media indifference to the recent Restore Nature Now event protest in London.

Perhaps we need a more direct and personal approach. At this year’s Hay Festival there was a warm reception for Robin Wall Kimmerer, US author of Braiding Sweetgrass, who blends knowledge from her career as a plant scientist with the traditions passed down through her Native American ancestry, to the enrichment of both strands of human understanding.

She writes in particular about her own practice of putting people in touch with soil, rivers and plants. This featured too in a session on native wisdom traditions at this year’s Oxford Real Farming Conference, where Angharad Wynne from Wales was a speaker. “When you bring people together in a space where the aim is to build community and honour the space, magical things happen,” she said, emphasising also the need to ‘welcome the stranger’. [59-61 mins]

With all this in mind, it was exciting to be part of a new venture on my own patch, a wassailing ceremony at Gogerddan Heritage Orchard near Aberystwyth. How do you start a new tradition? The orchard is just seven years old and its 250 trees are planted scientifically in rows so it’s hardly a repository of ancient lore. Wales might have a fine tradition of orchards with accompanying cultural events, as Carwyn Graves describes in his Apples of Wales, but they have long died out and there are no obvious instructions for how to do our own.

But the will was there, and we worked with what we had. The initial impetus came from Olga, one of the Aberystwyth Conservation Volunteers who have been involved with the orchard from the start. She had been to wassailing events in London so was familiar with the basic plan: tie toast to the trees, read them poems, chuck cider at them, make a noise, and celebrate, all with the general intention of encouraging them to fruit well that year.

Meanwhile Welsh apple enthusiasts had recently decreed that 9 February, the birthday of St Teilo, should be a national day of apple activity. That gave us our date.

Then there was the place. The orchard is in the grounds of Plas Gogerddan, home of the former Welsh Plant Breeding Station led by Sir George Stapledon, whose scientific approach to farming was mixed with visionary idealism; he would probably have approved. Just up the road in the village of Penrhyncoch lives Rhiannon Ifans, author of Sers a Rybana, a study of Welsh-language wassailing songs. Local residents Brenda and Eleri chose verses from the book and set them to suitable tunes, so we had Welsh wassails alongside the English ones. Olga also invited musicians from Twmpath Aberystwyth, who provided an accordionist and a fiddler.

Pig Aderyn

We gathered after dark, some 20 or 30 of us, set up our things on a picnic table and got to it. We chose three trees to honour. The first was Pig Aderyn, a cider variety from St Dogmael’s Abbey, which some of us had helped harvest last year. A sprawling, ungainly tree with masses of red fruit, the stalk sometimes resembling a bird’s beak, there are several specimens in the orchard and the fruit last year went into a single variety cider. We read it an English poem, splashed it with cider and banged saucepans.

On then to Marged Nicholas, a dignified old lady with a strong upright habit. Marged comes from Carmarthenshire and is a cooking, eating and cider variety. Her fruit had made it into a general mix for cider, and she got a Welsh wassail.

Court of Wick

I can’t remember what the third variety was – it was dark and hard to find the right tree – but I know which it should have been: Court of Wick. This is a prolific variety from Somerset, very good for eating. With a flavour somewhere between a Cox and a Russet, the apples are small and nutty with a red blush and gold flecks. There are eight of this variety in the orchard and last year we saved the fruit for distribution to local primary schools. We’d even walked a gang of five-year-olds half an hour each way from their school to help with the picking one sunny September afternoon.

Afterwards there was celebration with music, dancing, cider and apple juice, before we tidied up and went home. What surprised me was how easily the event flowed, without any artificiality. It seemed quite natural to express gratitude for last year’s harvest and joy at the thought of next year’s. How miraculous that apples should exist in such abundance and variety, and that there are insects to pollinate them, and sunshine and rain to make them grow.

While we’re at it, how wonderful that publicly funded projects administered in offices should generate whole orchards for our benefit, and that university staff and volunteers should come forward to care for them. What a privilege to be able to collect and distribute their fruit, and how we hope that the next season will be as good.

Plans were immediately made to celebrate Orchard Blossom Day in April, this time in daylight, and with poetry and more dancing, and we did that too (see the amateur video). No doubt there will be more celebrations at harvest time.

These are strange times, as it can feel that the natural world is collapsing around us, and that humanity is bringing about its own destruction. But this is no time to despair. The message I took away from these orchard events is that it’s not hard to make a connection with the trees and the soil, and with each other. We just need to be willing to try.

Harvesting Pig Aderyn