This month’s open day is a more unusual event as we also launch an OrganicLea book: “Seedlings from the Smoke: Musings of an urban market gardener” and celebrate our chilli fire power:
*12 noon: Seasonal workshop introducing the ‘World of Chillies’. For all you hot-heads, our annual round-up of the now 43 varieties of chillies growing at Hawkwood and personably collected from around the world with their unique story and fire! What’s growing, how are they grown and how are they used?
*1.30pm: Lunch time – bring a packed lunch
*2pm: Guided site tours
*3pm: Book launch (more info below)
*12-3pm (with a break for lunch): Forest School – activities and free play for children of all ages. Children under 6 must be accompanied. Spaces are limited so please email liz@organiclea.org.uk
As is our custom, running alongside the above, there will be ‘drop-in’ seasonal horticultural activity from 12-3pm for those who would like to chat and work together with us.
Directions to our Hawkwood site here.
SEEDLINGS FROM THE SMOKE
In October 2009, OrganicLea and friends came together to mark and celebrate, the end of our year-long permaculture design process at the Hawkwood Plant Nursery site. Together we all looked onwards to a landscape many were creating: Community market gardening on London’s edge.
Since then, Ru, has recorded our experiences in a blog, reflecting the seasons’ turning over the last 5 years. It captures so much of our learnings, comings, growings and doings over these years and we are grateful for the creative time he has given to documenting that last five years of OrganicLea’s journeying.
We have decided to publish these ‘musings of an urban market gardener’ as an illustrated book – a chance to celebrate and commemorate the last five years in a way that can be shared with and hopefully provide inspiration to many.
The book will be launched at our Open Day on Sunday 26 October, 3pm. Please email plants[at]organiclea.org.uk (replace [at] with @) if you would like to attend the launch.
You can of course read the blogs still here. And an insight into the book that brings them together, from the foreword by David Ransom:
‘So now … we have Hawkwood – and this immensely enjoyable, informative, inspiring, beguiling, self-effacing, funny, invaluable account of its infancy. The ‘urban market garden’ has evidently been transplanted, grown and flourished, well beyond my fondest hopes…. ‘
‘…a gardener’s diary like no other.’
(David Ransom, co-editor of New Internationalist magazine between 1989 and 2009)
Photograph by Joanna Bojczewska.
