OxGrow Oxford's Edible Community Garden

Our new tools from Simon at Get Digging!

One of the best things about running a community project on a complete shoe-string is the generosity you encounter. Our “beg, borrow and (not quite) steal” approach to developing the OxGrow site has forced us to be creative and has made us many new friends along the way – it’s been brilliant!

The latest gifts to come our way are three beautiful hand-made tools, made by the lovely Simon from Get Digging. His self-proclaimed mission is to get people digging, “faster, easier, and with a lot less backache”. Even the no-dig aficionados amongst us know that sometimes you’ve just gotta dig… Simon has scoured the world for gardeners and farmers whose tools are more intuitive to use than our lowly homegrown spades and forks. Here’s a pic of Joe trying out our new “azada”, which uses gravity from the angled swinging movement more than brute  human strength to slice through the turf:

Tilling the sweetcorn bed

Our new long-handled spade – long so you have to bend less – proved pretty nifty in the last throes of preparing our enormous triangular sweetcorn bed, and the right-angled fork will no doubt come in handy later in the season when we’ve got more weeds…

What else did we get up to on Sunday? We planted up our second hexagonal bed with a mix of wild-flower seeds – to spruce up our entrance to the plot and for food for the bees. We sowed some runner beans and planted lots of different varieties of courgettes, squashes and pumpkins through a huge square of mypex (also a gift, well, a barter-exchange undertaken with our heritage wheat guru John – one roll of weed-suppressing black plastic swapped for the promise of some help on his farm later in the summer!).

The day was particularly lively as there was a fourth birthday party going on in the pavilion, so there were loads of kids running around flying kites on Hogacre Common. Some of them even helped out with the squash patch.

Come down next week – among other things we’ll be sowing our heritage sweetcorn, a red-kernelled variety called Bloody Butcher!

Doireann

On Marlborough Road. More pictures on our Flickr account

OxGrow had a bit of a maintenance session this weekend, sharpening up our now razor-like collection of spades and starting on the creation of new wooden plant labels to replace the previous ones made of recycled plastic bottle, which are blowing away in the wind and getting hard to read. Further progress was made on the future sweetcorn bed due to some unerring and single-minded digging efforts. We also honed our barrel-rolling skills moving two huge 400 gallon (almost 2,000 litre) water butts along roads and paths to Hogacre Common, to the great intrigue of the locals. With some careful steering, we’re pleased to report no small children were squashed or wing-mirrors knocked off en route. Even more perplexed by our exploits than the local population was the signalman who had to give us permission by telephone to roll the monster water tanks across 5 contiguous sets of railway lines in order to get access to the site. Thanks to the Spragglesea Mead and Dean’s Ham Allotment Association for the donation!

We also harvested a batch of radishes to enjoy during our break with Libby’s tasty yoghurt-based radish dip, the left-overs being distributed amongst the volunteers to take home. The radish harvest raises the spectre of an age-old problem for back-yard horticulturalists the world over – the glut. What exactly do you do with a fridge full of radishes? The humble scarlet radish is not renowned for its culinary diversity, normally being limited to a fresh peppery salad ingredient. A bit of research, however, reveals that the true potential of this vegetable may have been overlooked. For the French, it is the revered main ingredient in the ultimate gourmet sandwich, for instance. Chill a couple of radishes by sitting them in iced water in the fridge for an hour or two, then slice very thinly and place on buttered bread sprinkled with salt. I guarantee, absolutely delicious, even if it doesn’t sound it. I also discovered a recipe for making use of the slightly prickly and unpromising green leaves that spring from the top of the radish. Sauté some onion, garlic and potato until cooked, add a vegetable stock and then throw in as many finely-chopped radish leaves as you have. Cook for a further 20 minutes. At this point you are supposed to put it in a blender and add milk, but I had neither blender nor milk, and it still tasted great.

OxGrow, stretching your culinary horizons since 2011.

Julian

This morning our very own Doireann Lalor was on BBC Radio Oxford speaking to Malcolm Boyden about OxGrow.

Have a listen by clicking the link below. Just press the green play button when the player pops up:

Hard at Work

On Sunday we were back at the OxGrow site after the Easter break, watering all of our lovely plants after the scorching weather and getting stuck into planting some more vegetables and herbs. Although the strawberries were in need of quite a huge amount of water, the potatoes, jerusalem artichokes, shallots and radishes are all coming along nicely. We created two new no-dig beds alongside our potatoes using compost and topsoil and planted seeds such as fennel, kohlrabi and spring onions. The heritage wheat bed was completed by planting rows of quinoa to fill the second half of the triangle. After reviving our broad beans we planted another line along the length of the fence. The day was wonderfully sunny and we took a well-deserved break to re-apply the suncream, re-hydrate, admire our handiwork and munch on some delicious fresh radishes!

OxGrow Radishes

Annabelle

We’ve had more coverage in the local papers thanks to Ben and Helen who run Low Carbon South Oxford and manage Hogacre Common, the big ‘eco park’ that OxGrow is a part of. Read it here.

Doireann

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