SAVE food hub often receives bread from local stores and FareShare.

One of my favourite things about this time of the year is blackberry picking on open public land near my home. It’s a mystery to me why no-one else visits the patch but that means there are more for me! They grow from July to October and vary in size and taste. We have had a fair bit of rain so the ones I am picking at the moment are plump and juicy.

With the “Hungry Gap” coming to an end, it was lovely to see an array of fruit and vegetables recently at the larder along with a lot of eggs all from FareShare. April, May and early June tend to be the months when winter crops have finished but the new season’s fruit and vegetables are not ready to eat, known as the Hungry Gap.

The International 80th Anniversary D-Day Beacon overlooking Gold Beach will be lit in Normandy at 8:15pm (BST), followed by other beacons at the other Normandy invasion beaches at 8:30pm with the principal UK based beacon at Portsmouth at 9:15pm. Communities in the UK are asked to pay tribute to those who took part 80 years ago and SAVE food hub will be shining a light at its premises in Queen Street along with other local businesses and groups.

Seaton Library Community Fridge celebrates one-year anniversary, saving thousands of meals from being wasted.

The community fridge in Seaton library has been a resounding success since being introduced last April. However, some foods do not need to be in the fridge, notably bread, and displaying it tidily has been a bit of a challenge for the SAVE food hub volunteers and library staff. So Beer Men’s Shed came to the rescue and with funding from the Friends of Seaton Library (FOSL) they have custom-built a display unit which now sits proudly alongside the fridge. This means all the different sizes and shapes of bread can be easily selected by library users.

Some estimate that as much as 50% of food is thrown away in the western world. Some of this is understandable as a lot of us overbuy fruit and vegetables so they go soft or slimy and mouldy in the bottom of the fridge before we remember them. But apparently a lot of us throw away food which is beyond its best-before date because we somehow think that it has become toxic and will do us harm whilst it actually means the quality of the food may deteriorate beyond the date given but still be palatable.

As you know we have recently benefitted from some gleaning. This brought a lot of very muddy carrots to the larder many of which were quite strange shapes! They were very tasty and well worth the effort of removing the mud and navigating the odd shapes with your peeler. We also received a tray of beautiful squashes from Jolly Pumpkins PYO near Silverton gleaned by a team of volunteers. Even better for us all, they were rescued from becoming wasted food.

In its first six months of operation a massive 2.4 tonnes of food has been saved from going to waste thanks to the library fridge. Put another way that’s a large truck or shipping container full of food! The fridge opened in April this year with the help of a grant from Seaton Town Council and is a joint venture between Seaton Library and SAVE food hub.

I recently saw a picture of this painting which seems representative of this time of year.

Two of our local larder volunteers are raising funds to support FareShare.

Here at SAVE we get our surplus food from Fareshare South West, Exeter Food Action, the local supermarkets, businesses and farms as well as from people who are green fingered enough to have surplus produce from their gardens and allotments.

With the extra May bank holiday to celebrate the King’s Coronation focusing on volunteering it is a reminder to all of us what a difference lending a hand can make to people’s lives and to communities.

Like many local organisations, SAVE food hub in Seaton is run by volunteers. In fact, it relies on about 35 volunteers. Some volunteer every week, some several times a week and others as and when needed.

Seaton Library is joining the national drive to cut down on food waste with the introduction of a community fridge in the library. Food shops/supermarkets, local food producers and businesses can donate perishable food that would otherwise be wasted to the fridge for anyone to use.

The Seaton Library Community Fridge will make surplus food available to all for free. The aim is to reduce food waste, save households and businesses money and strengthen community resilience.

The next six weeks or so are an annual challenge for us in the UK because it’s when home grown onions, carrots and potatoes which have been stored since last autumn start to sprout. Other vegetables bolt or run to seed. The first spinach, salads and new potatoes will not be with us until May.

Many local groups and businesses supported the Grizzly Race (an annual gruelling race from Seaton through Beer, Branscombe and back organised by Axe Valley Runners). Tesco Seaton donated a huge pile of bananas so that every runner could enjoy a healthy snack when they finished the race. LED (Leisure East Devon) staff stepped in to hand out the fruit. At the end of the day, there were some bananas left and these found their way to the Seaton Community Larder where they were very welcome.

Santa’s elves had it easy compared to the SAVE food hub volunteers over Christmas and New Year. Across our five communities, in Seaton, Axmouth, Axminster, Colyton and Sidmouth, volunteers saved a staggering 5.5 tonnes of food in December.