On Wednesday evening, the 6th of May 2026, Chris and Fran from Incredible Edible Todmorden headed over the moors to Clitheroe to give a talk to the town’s gardening club — and what a lovely night it turned out to be.

Fran took the lead, and she was brilliant. To a room of around 25 keen and engaged gardeners, she told the story of Incredible Edible Todmorden — where it came from, what it’s grown into, and what we’re up to now. It’s a story that never gets old, and in the right hands it has a way of stopping people in their tracks. Wednesday was one of those nights.

The Q&A that followed was lively and genuinely curious. These were proper gardeners, people who wanted to understand not just the what but the how and the why. The questions ranged from the practical to the philosophical. Do you get a lot of vandalism? Are you guerrilla gardeners? It’s always interesting which questions come up when people hear about IET for the first time — they reveal as much about people’s assumptions as they do about us.

The honest answers, as ever, are more interesting than people expect. Vandalism is far rarer than you’d think — when a community feels ownership of something, it tends to look after it. And guerrilla gardeners? Well, we prefer to think of ourselves as very opportunistic rather than guerrillas.

But the conversation that really seemed to land on Wednesday was about something deeper than growing. What Fran talked about — and what the audience kept coming back to — was how IET is really about people. The gardening is the door you walk through, but what’s inside is something much bigger: community, connection, belonging. A place where everyone is welcome, no experience required, no barriers at the gate. Young, old, new to town or born here, green-fingered or never grown a thing in your life — it doesn’t matter. You show up, and you’re in.

So much of that comes down to our volunteers. IET doesn’t run on big funding or infrastructure — it runs on people who turn up, week after week, because they care about their town and each other. They’re the ones with their hands in the soil, yes, but more than that they’re the ones who make newcomers feel welcome, who remember names, who make the whole thing feel like a community rather than a project. Without them, there’s no IET. It really is that simple.

Evenings like this matter. The Incredible Edible idea began in Todmorden but it was always meant to travel — that’s the whole point. Every talk Fran gives, every question she answers, every gardener who goes home thinking differently about what a town can do with a bit of soil and a lot of goodwill, that’s the work continuing.

Thank you to Clitheroe Gardening Club for having us. And thank you to Fran for representing IET so brilliantly.