Find food for free in the city

Top tip: Avoid picking from the direct roadside and low down on bushes to avoid traffic fumes and dog wee.

Don't assume that you have to grow your own. If you look around where you live there are all sorts of foods you can use.  And autumn is a great time to collect them.

Of course, everybody knows about blackberries and they can often be found in hedges in parks - in fact my friend, Joy, collected them by the bag load last year from Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery.  As we are still without an oven and the freezers are still full, I won't be collecting berries this year and making jam.

Other less well known berries that you can easily find in the wild (and in wild parts of town) are elderberries and sloes.  Both are tart in flavour but elderberries mix well with apples in a jam and apparently you can also make liqueurs and wines out of it.  Sloes, found on blackthorn bushes,  give flavour and colour to gins and vodkas. They are better after a frost to develop the sugars.

Prick them all over, put 460g of sloes into 1 litre of vodka divided between two empty 75cl vodka bottles.  Using a funnel divide 112g of white granulated sugar into each bottle.  Shake the bottles every day until the sugar is dissolved.  Store into a cool, dark place. Leave for at least 3 months.

Also look out for unwanted fruit on trees in public places - plums, cherries and apples are often planted with nobody to pick the fruit. A local Transition Town initiative in Brockley is to match unharvested trees in public places and gardens with a team who will pick away and give away the fruit to passers-by.