[Forgive the non-postings... I hadn't been putting my columns up here as they now go up on the main Standard website and didn't want to double up. However, after the first day, they disappear in the ether, so as a record, here are the last few...]

A LONDON LIFE
21st April

THERE are few places I would rather be than up a tree. It is finding a reason to be up a tree which is tricky — and I found one on Sunday in the garden of my friend Robin Grey, author of the blog Hackney Permaculture, which details the joys and travails of creating a small farm in his backyard.

Robin has persuaded his next-door neighbour to knock down their shared fence and collaborate on a permaculture plot. Where once there was a slab of concrete, now there are salad beds, raspberry bushes, runner bean poles and a pond. Amazingly, his landlord doesn't mind, which shouldn't be amazing, but is.

He has performed all this with help from local co-operatives such as Growing Communities, a volunteer-run open farm in Stoke Newington, and initiatives like "Seedy Sunday" — not a sabbath of debauchery, but a regular plant swap on London Fields.

The idea is that pooling resources is the best way of tilting food production towards self-sufficiency.

Whereas gardening for the last generation was a private business, for the younger generation it is a gently radical, communal activity.

Today, a knowledgeable local named Ken has dropped by to plant willow and perform surgery on a troublesome elder (tree, that is, not someone's gran). Why toil on a stranger's private garden? Well, Ken has no patch of his own and a day's digging in the sun is reward in itself.

To compound his environmentalism, Robin is a vegan (I try not to hold it against him), which is problematic in a British climate.

The sources of protein that a vegan relies on, such as soya beans, must be imported from far-f lung corners of the world which, you can imagine, is the sort of thing that exercises the vegan greatly.

A solution to this is "leaf-curd", a protein-rich, tofu-like substance extracted from leaves. According to an evangelical document we found on Google, it is the food of the future: cheap, versatile and amazingly nutritious. It can be made from almost any young leaf — including those of the voracious lime tree in Robin's garden, which was all the excuse I needed to scale the thing.

We should all spend more time up trees. Not only does it make you feel like Ray Mears, it is educative — at last I established that the lime tree has nothing whatesoever to do with limes — and therapeutic.

As for the "leafu" — the washed, liquidised and strained leaves yielded a bowl of mulch (superior fertiliser) and around 200ml of potent green liquid. When boiled, the nutrients in this solidified into a substance we stir-fried with purple sprouting broccoli and noodles.

It was not revolting — and that felt like a good day's work.