Join Marc Stenham and I as we discuss agroforestry, nature immersion and radical ideas on what is edible. Marc is lead gardener at The Rodmell Food Forest, a Chinese Acupuncturist and educator.
https://www.facebook.com/rodmellfoodforest
https://rodmellfoodforest.org/
To consider training with Hannah Jewel, your host, visit:
https://jewelofpeace.com/training/
Hannah Jewel · Agroforestry with Marc Stenham
‘Hello everybody and welcome to Building for Peace with Hannah Jewel. Today we have as our guest, Marc Stenham, and Marc works in Agroforestry which is an incredibly deep interest for me. I would love to create an Agroforest one day, and I’m so excited to have him on the show for this reason. He’s been doing Agroforestry for the last 10 years or so, has a background in organic farming, he works with school children on projects teaching them how to garden, and we’re going to learn so much from him today! Welcome Marc.
Marc: Thanks Hannah.
Hannah: Would you like to begin with a little bit of your story and how you started? And what brought you to a place where you wanted to work with the land?
Marc: I feel like my story starts in a bit of a strange way – waking up to nature, or waking up to the land. I grew up in Brighton and I remember a time in my late teens, going to parties out on the downs, and finding myself in nature for the first time on my own choice, and just really turning onto it. I think ever since then I’ve just more and more embraced it and wanted to understand more about how to work with the land and how nature evolves. I think during that part of my life, I was really struggling with the idea of empowerment, and how can I empower myself towards independent living. I explored lots of different avenues – like protesting, or living in other ways like squatting, so yeah exploring other ways of doing things – but food production or growing food just seemed a long way from me and I really connected with that.
Hannah: Yeah, so from this deep connection to nature that you found outside of the city, there arose a desire to live alternatively. I think perhaps a lot of us (humans) were a part of squatting and protesting and the free party scene. And then you, at a relatively young age, moved into gardening and working with the land for a sense of true independence. You were chatting earlier about how you started with an allotment, and then went into organic gardening – tell us a little more about that?
Marc: I think when I first started, I was helping on a community garden that was in Brighton – I saw the guys that run it the other day at a seed swap in Brighton, it was lovely to see them. I remember more than 20 years ago going up and working with them. I’m just thinking about what I love about them – it’s not only about food production, but I think when you work the land, for me it’s also about community and fitness, and actually I quite like working hard and getting dirty, that kind of physical stuff. I have no care for pristine living – I found that working in that way I could just really relax with it. It felt really right – so after working with the community garden, I took on an allotment for a while and began to learn how to grow. At that time in my life, I was still moving around quite a lot, I was quite nomadic, going abroad a bit, and going off to festivals, so I would start growing things but then not look after them because I wasn’t there. But it was definitely the beginning of a process of learning how to look after the land. From that I had a few years where I went abroad, but when I came back I started working at an organic farm which is over in Plumpton. I was already very interested and had some knowledge, but that’s really where I began to learn a lot about growing food.
H: And that’s when you began to experience the concept of roots, of rooting yourself to the land.’…listen to the full cast for more!