Lessons from the Microbiome
some notes from my workshops
Since March I've been running a monthly fermenting workshop at the Windmill Community Gardens here in Margate, a charity dedicated to providing outdoor access – "somewhere safe to grow food" – to families in this still quite deprived area of Thanet. (When I first moved to Margate most people's response was why, now it's more likely to be ooh, my sister's having her hen do at the sauna there – gentrification happens in layers and leaves some parts behind). While I've done a lot of workshops and lessons here and there (Little Duck in Dalston, Anna Tasca Lanza in Sicily, Bayte in St. Leonards) this is the first time I've done it regularly enough for me to lose my performance anxiety around teaching or in fact to lose the idea of it being a performance at all, I always call it a workshop or a session instead of a lesson and it is relaxed enough that interruptions form a welcome part of the experience rather than derailing the carefully timed schedule I've always felt necessary when asking people to pay a chunk of money to learn something from me. In repetition I feel I am building a practice in the sense that an artist means it, similar but distinct to the practice of restaurant cookery or of my weekly work at my own allotment in Canterbury. A monthly visit to the gardens (I rarely have time to go otherwise) is frequent but occasional enough that each time I see it completely transformed – yesterday going to the part of the site they call their forest garden I found it changed from an open space of nettle and alexanders to a fairytale woodland, almond trees bowed into arches across the grass paths.
