Andrew Oldham writes about Pig Row, which is three gardens over a quarter of an acre in Scouthead. Visit at www.lifeonpigrow.co.uk
DURING 1939-45 home gardeners produced ten per cent of the nation’s food. You may not think that’s a lot but it works out at one million tons of food a year.
In 2013 we send approximately seven million tons of food a year to landfill. Up to 50 per cent of dustbin waste can be composted. 
During one day we throw away 1.6 million of untouched bananas, 1.3 million unopened yoghurts, 600,000 whole uncooked eggs, 1.2 million untouched sausages and 20 million slices of bread.
In 1939 we imported 70 per cent of our food but by 1945 more than 7per cent of our food was home grown. Today we import 68 per cent of our food.
This is why we turned the clocks back to 1943 at Pig Row: a year of growing food under the guidance of the Ministry of Agriculture and the gardeners of the day.
In spring we thought the project was doomed because of cold weather. All our plants were on windowsills and in the glasshouse on hotbeds. If we had lost these plants to the cold, we would have lost crops and gone hungry.
We nurtured them every day; we became obsessive about how they were growing and what we could feed them without using chemicals. This is not just because we’re organic it was because many people who did grow during the war didn’t have access to the chemicals we use today.
In Saddleworth, gardeners’ know-how had been passed down through families; feeds and pesticides made from nettles and comfrey in the hedgerows and rhubarb (which isn’t just a pudding but a pesticide).
At Pig Row we have tubs full of feed, manure teas, dried comfrey to add to planting holes, trenches dug for kitchen scraps to be filled in and planted up with beans. Spring may have been bad but summer is blazing as I write this, and those feeds are paying dividends.
Last month people on our Facebook Page signed up for a month of no waste (www.facebook.com/lifeonpigrow). At the end of the month we had reduced our waste by 70per cent..
In July we started to produce our own how-o leaflets to get you growing, foraging and recycling; twenty-six leaflets paying homage to the twenty-six Dig For Victory leaflets produced during the war and ration years.
We waste more food in one year than people produced in their gardens during the entire Second World War. That has to stop. It doesn’t matter what space you have – it is time we and our council take responsibility for our food.
Our recreation spaces, our parks, our schools, our hospitals, our bus stops, our roadside verges and any piece of ground given over to grass should have edible areas. There should be more allotments and fewer lawns.
Let’s celebrate soldiers who survived and fell for our freedom during those war years but let’s celebrate every child, wife, husband and grandparent who reached for a spade.
We should celebrate growing – it is our heritage and future. We cannot continue to import so much for so little gain. That is what turning back the clocks to 1943 has taught us: we can do our bit, we can do it now and we can make a difference.
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