This is a blog post from Trey, who lives in Penygroes. Trey is originally from Mississippi and has thrown himself into community activities since moved came to Wales eight years ago. Trey was a member of the Dyffryn Nantlle Community Assemblies on the Climate, and he is one of the enthusiastic people behind the idea of the Pickling Shed.
The Pickling Shed will be located at the back of the old post office in Penygroes – while the front of the building will be green food hub, a permanent home for the community pantry and the food hub from local producers.
Contact Siôn (nantlle@gwyrddni.cymru) for more information or to be part of this!
Cwt Piclo (the Pickling Shed) Dyffryn Nantlle – by Trey
On Monday night the 24th of June a meeting was held for the Cwt Piclo: a new group in Dyffryn Nantlle who are learning about how people preserved food in the past and aiming to introduce new ways and traditions of pickling, brewing and fermenting food.
Why a pickling shed?
Many people have turned back to the garden to grow their own vegetables and fruit. There’s another step; to learn how to handle the food once the harvest has arrived, especially when an excess of one crop has ripened at once. Instead of worrying about what to do with loads of rhubarb or cabbage, we are collecting recipes to make chutney or kimchi.
We’re looking forward to when more vegetables and fruit will come to the table after the cold start to the gardening season we have experienced this year. In the meantime, we are gathering recipes and sharing them with each other.
Making Kombucha
We have held two workshops on rhubarb chutneys and on kombucha: a tea drink brewed with a symbiotic culture of yeast and bacteria.
Interest in kombucha is growing across the world in part because of how easy it is to brew. Tea and sugar are the only requirements, with a few litres of Eryri water and a cupboard to forget about it in for a week. Brewing kombucha may seem like a passing fad, but it is these small changes that can help us reconnect to what we eat and why.
Brewing kombucha may seem like a passing fad, but it is these small changes that can help us reconnect to what we eat and why.
Where did the idea come from?
The Cwt Piclo was formed as a response to climate change in Dyffryn Nantlle, as part of
the GwyrddNi climate assemblies in 2022-23. We are reclaiming our food to try and reduce the energy
used to grow, handle and transport it, and to create a more resilient community ready for
any disruption to our food systems.
When filling bottles and packing jars, we grow the ability to see potential wherever we look. A sunny patch of empty land, a forgotten tree with ripe fruit, and even the food shelf in the a supermarket that has foods that have passed the date on the package. I now go to this shelf regularly to see what I can put in a jar to ferment. Last week I came home with three kilos of strawberries and a kilo of green beans. Who knows what I will find this week?
There is a deep satisfaction in taking leftover food and transforming it into a new product, to save something that would have been wasted in order to present it in a new way. It touches something in us as people, a certain longing we feel, a certain look we raise to the horizon before going indoors at the end of the day. And sharing this with the rest of the Cwt Piclo has been pure joy.
In a season of elections and debate, in a world that trembles under tumult and war, we need an opportunity to come together and celebrate the rhythm of the seasons, to remind ourselves that the purpose of our lives is not tribulation and pain. This is a way for us to remember the little things.
A bottle of kombucha will not revolutionise our society or our minds. But it has been a good start for some of us in Dyffryn Nantlle. I look forward to what comes next.