OxGrow Oxford's Edible Community Garden

Two little bits of news…

The lovely Phil from the Oxford Permaculture Group has donated us a metal file and old fashioned oil stone, so we can get sharpening our blunt second-hand tools and make life easier for ourselves. Thanks Phil!

And, very excitingly, OxGrow has just been trained up to become a Seed Steward for Garden Organic’s Sowing New Seeds initiative, which is training up allotmenteers and community food groups to grow exotic crops not traditionally grown in the U.K. So if you thought trying to eat local food would condemn you to a bland diet of endless cabbages, spuds and broad beans, think again!

The latest additions to our OxGrow seed bank are crops such as Calaloo (crucial in Jamaican curries), Shark-Fin Melon (a stringy Vietnamese gourd that behaves like… shark’s fins when you throw it into a pot of stock), Fenugreek/Methi (a leafy green found in many Indian dishes) and the humble Chickpea.

We’ll be scheming how to roll out OxGrow’s global growing adventure soon, so let us know if you’d like to help out with this or if you know of any people or community groups who might be interested in getting involved, either in the growing stage or in the cookery experiments that will inevitably ensue late in the summer!

Doireann