A Year Long Feast: The Hoo Heddern

Taking its name from the Saxon name for a storeroom, The Hoo Heddern is a travelling ‘library’ of food, housed in a mobile trailer, and a place dedicated to the seasons of the Hoo Peninsula.

Artist and food systems researcher Cherry Truluck is working with local residents to fill the Heddern with stories, recipes, oral histories, seeds, ingredients, and fragments of lived knowledge. Gathered and archived season by season, these contributions will form a living almanac - a record of what grows here, what is remembered here, and how food binds people to place over time: equal parts farming record, folklore compendium and speculative weather report. Borrowing from agricultural science, traditional almanacs and a dash of astrology, the project asks what it might mean to read the land as carefully as we read the stars.

At the heart of the project is a field of oats, sown on the Peninsula with a group of local young people. As the Heddern gathers stories, the oats gather light, rain, labour and care. Their slow passage from seed to harvest becomes both material and metaphor - a shared act of tending that anchors the project in the rhythms of soil and climate. The work leans deliberately into the temporalities of growing: waiting, uncertainty, repetition, collective effort, and eventual transformation.

Through Kitchen Table gatherings and seasonal events, residents, growers and young people will come together to reflect on past, present and future food practices - sharing meals, memories and practical knowledge. The oats, and the archive that grows alongside them, offer a way to reconsider what “seasonal” and “local” might mean in a time of industrial agriculture, climate instability and increasing food insecurity.

The Hoo Heddern marks the first stage of Cherry Truluck's long-term project A Year Long Feast exploring community-led stewardship of land and food on the Hoo Peninsula, responding to the erosion of rural knowledge and heritage while cultivating new relationships rooted in care, continuity and collective nourishment.