British Beanpole Campaign

INTRODUCTION

Each year some 50 000 tones of charcoal is imported into Britain. It takes 6 tonnes of wood to make one tonne of charcoal or a total of 300 000 tonnes of wood from dubious environmental sources, such as mangrove swamps or slave labour in Brazil, to make the imported charcoal. For a pound or so more we can afford to produce this charcoal in the UK from well managed woodlands. This pound extra spent each year on our bag of charcoal would mean the sustainable management of 50 000 ha of coppice woodland in the Britain.

While they may seem small our choices as individual consumers have a massive power to cause good or harm when aggregated up with everyone else's similar choice. The Allotment Forestry Project was established by Ipswich Wildlife Group and Ipswich Organic Gardeners Group to make a start in improving the nature of consumer choices by gardeners. The product we chose to focus on is the simplest woodland product, the Beanpole.

Most gardeners these days grow their runner beans up bamboo poles. In essence they have imported a twig all the way from China! Vast numbers are required each year although there are technical and logistical problems to be overcome if we are to increase the use of British Beanpoles. Even a moderate shift in consumer demand, to say 25% of the market supplied with British beanpoles, will have a profound impact on woodlands and woodland businesses.

But how to do this as two small local groups with no money? Through trial and error we have ended up concentrating on three areas:

Increasing Access to Local Beanpoles

The first step in developing a 'British Beanpole Campaign' we felt was to improve access to locally grown beanpoles and peasticks. We started by planting two derelict allotment plots adjacent to ours. This it turns out was not allowed under general allotment conditions and we were fortunate that once Ipswich Borough Council and Ipswich Allotment Holders Association were reassured we were not going to neglect the plots supported their continued use but stressed the need to keep them informed. Elsewhere other groups have managed to come to arrangements with their local allotment societies or council.

Waiting 6-8 years for the first beanpoles to grow we realised would mean a slow start for the use British Beanpoles Campaign! We therefore teamed up with conservation volunteers working a local wood, Spring Wood, where lots of useful wood was being put on the bonfire or in a dead hedge, as they had no use for it. A team of volunteer gardeners followed behind the conservation volunteers, who cut the wood, sorting the cut material into useful products. We now produce around 2000 beanpoles and peasticks each year as well as other items such as firewood Rustic Poles and walking stick blanks. We sell these at our annual Beanpole Festival, with the 6th being held in 2003.

We have also supported the planting of other allotment plots in Ipswich, Wickham Market, Aldeburgh and Kirton as well as further afield in Kent, Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Norwich. Initially we got directly involved and tried to maintain the planted sites but soon found we overstretched ourselves and felt it best to encourage others with advice, occasional practical support and the free supply of materials such as plants and shelters.

Increasing Access to the Skills

Early on in the campaign it was evident that today's gardeners were unfamiliar with how to use locally grown wood in the garden. Skills that were commonplace a generation ago had been forgotten as people got used to manufactured items bought from the garden centre.
For a number of years we have run low cost courses on using wood in the garden. More recently our monthly tree nursery work party has included rustic woodwork projects as we develop our demonstration area. We have also produced factsheets on rustic projects for the garden that are available as paper copies or on the Internet. New in 2002 were a series of Rustic Wood work master classes held at our Annual Beanpole Festival.

Improving Access to the Products

Once we started talking to gardeners and encouraging them to use local grown beanpoles we were frequently asked for suppliers of other local products such as charcoal and rustic furniture. As a result we produced our own 'Yellow Pages' of local wood product businesses supplying products for the garden. We put together displays of these products borrowed from the suppliers at our annual beanpole festival, as a sort of shop window of what is available locally.

More recently with financial help from the Forestry Commission, Countryside Agency, Shell Better Britain Campaign and the Suffolk Environment Trust we have produce a web site www.allotmentforestry.com . Part of this has an Internet directory of over 200 businesses across England supplying every type of garden wood product. The Website has been a real a boon. Once information is on it such as factsheets we have a cheap means of reproduction, people pay for their own copies! At the same it has improved the quality of what we do and has helped us to understand what people want, through the tracking and feedback the website gives us. It has also created new opportunities that we may wish to follow, such as themed product based web promotions.

THE FUTURE

As a voluntary group with two work parties a month to undertake most of what we do we need to keep our aspirations practical and fun. Our priorities for the next few years are:

To improve our demonstration area;
To get as many allotment fields in our 'Greater Ipswich' area to have a beanpole plot as possible:
To continually develop the website, adding more factsheets and businesses.
To develop an 'Allotment Forestry Network' to share ideas and to help others set up similar projects.

From our simple starting point of promoting the British Beanpole our work has widened to include promoting a local wood consuming culture. This we believe is essential for promoting a future where we meet more of our needs from what grows on our doorstep. As well as providing practical opportunities for people to make the 'right' choice we need to work to achieve the 'cultural' shift where it seems less wacky to cut beanpoles from the local wood than to import them from China.

Geoff Sinclair
Allotment Forestry Project
Sept 20th 2002

Conference presentation to the Small Woods Association Annual Conference