For Angus Farquhar, NVA’s Creative Director, these were the highlights:

There were many good points during the day, I like the fact that even with some stunning allotment and homemade dishes on offer throughout the day, the biggest spontaneous queue was for the dinner ladies doing extra chips between the double rubble schools competitions!

The other memory is the mixed expressions of horror and happiness on the small kids on the barber’s chair being mercilessly spun around and played with by the maverick 85A crew before their grassy headpieces were hacked off with giant scissors…

To help you re-live the day, we’ve uploaded some photos, courtesy of Neil Davidson, our photographer for the day. Take a look here. Do you have any of your own? If so, please do add them to the group, we’d love to see them.

Also, if you tasted anything you’re keen to re-create, then you could peruse our online Recipe Collection, full of recipes jotted down on the day and uploaded by us. Now you can re-create a little slice of Glasgow Harvest in the warmth of your own home.

If you managed to pick up a pack of Secret Seeds, keep checking back here to find out what you’re growing. Let us know how you’re getting on by uploading photos of your plants as they get bigger.

If you were at Glasgow Harvest, we’d really appreciate a couple of minutes of your time. Follow this link and fill out our evaluation survey. There are just four questions and they’re very quick to answer, it will help us in planning any future harvests.

Thanks so much to all who were involved. From the dinner ladies who helped out with the Double Rubble Chip Challenge, thirty volunteers, the eighteen schools who grew their own tatties, to the many allotmenteers who made sure there was always some soup on the go.

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To find out what Tasty twEATS & Harvest 2010, click here.

Credit: NVA

Central Station talk to Angus Farquhar, the man behind NVA, the politically driven public arts organisation who are hosting this weekend’s Glasgow Harvest event which celebrates urban growing.

How did NVA become involved in Glasgow Harvest?

The idea behind the Glasgow Harvest was simply that although Glasgow has a large community growing their own food it often takes place in the secret world of allotments, or in back gardens or balconies and I thought it would be good to bring all that activity out into the open to expand people’s sense of being part of something larger than themselves.

How does the project fit in with NVA’s broader philosophy?

It was a very conscious decision to work with the politics of food production and we got involved with Rolf Roscher (who runs an innovative landscape architecture practice ERZ), in delivering SAGE – Sow and Grow Everywhere, a region wide strategy to encourage the productive re-use and transformation of private and public land to grow food. The Harvest itself, has no audience, you participate by bringing food you have grown within a recipe or a pot of jam, so in this sense everyone has a productive role to play, with the only consumption being the food itself! We have made more and more works which are completed by the creative or physical actions of the public and horticulture is another way to extend and make visible a really vital and necessary part of urban living.

Credit: NVA

NVA takes a collective approach to its projects – tell us a bit more about the other groups you’re working with for Glasgow Harvest.

It’s a great eclectic mix, 20 schools growing tatties in rubble bags to make the best chips they can, (there was a horrific stat a few years ago that in one London primary school less than half a class knew that chips came from potatoes…)

85A have created their wonderfully surreal punk herb caps as an esoteric solution to lack of growing space in the city environment.

Acreative containers competition relies on the imagination of anyone who brings an unusual growing receptacle….all in all I think a village fete on acid, probably sums up our approach!

Central Station also recently did a project for Glasgow Harvest (called ‘twEATs’) – how did this partnership come about?

We were really excited by the way social media tools were used to extend the understanding and ownership of the White Bike Plan that we created for Glasgow International. We set another challenge to CenSta to come up with a lively way of allowing people to share an aspect of food growing or consumption and ‘twEATS’ was born, the booklet of donated recipes and graphic representations that we will give away on the day looks pretty sharp.

What do you think is the most interesting aspect of the use of social media in a creative project such as Glasgow Harvest?

It allows a group of people for whom those tools are a part of their everyday communication systems to explore a personal act (growing or cooking) in a collective context.

What aspect of the Glasgow Harvest project are you most excited about?

The hair clippings from the Herbaceous Barbershop being swept into allotment soup and tasting delicious…

Glasgow Harvest took place on 28 August 2010. Find out how it all went here.

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To find out what Tasty twEATS & Harvest 2010, click here.

Just in case you need convincing, here are 5 reasons why you should come along. We’ll be bringing you a further 5 early next week:

1. To celebrate urban growing by sharing your home-grown produce with hundreds of fellow growers.

Bring a vegetarian dish featuring an ingredient you’ve grown yourself. And while you’re at it, why don’t you bring a picture of the garden, windowsill or allotment where the action’s been taking place so you can add it to our Growers Map.

Take a look at our Flickr group and peruse some of the growing that’s been going on in Scotland this summer.

Image courtesy of Janie Nicoll.

2. To pick up your NVA, River Cottage, Central Station & Landshare twEATs Recipe Booklet.

Some of you may have joined us for twEATs, the first ever live-twitter-cook-off led by Tim Maddams of the River Cottage on the evening of the 16th August. Regardless, once the 28th comes around you’ll be able to get your hands on this commemorative booklet produced by Central Station and featuring illustrated recipes from members of their creative community plus top growing tips from Landshare.

3. To enter and help judge the Creative Containers competition.

Step 01, find a container, the weirder the better. Step 02, add soil. Step 03, add plant. Step 04, bring it to Harvest. Step 05, pat yourself on the back if you win one of three £50 prizes.

Looking for inspiration? Peruse our favourite containers, found on Flickr.

Image courtesy of Cafe Direct.

4. To contribute to and marvel at the kaleidoscopic Jam Wall.

We’re building a beautiful wall of jars. Each is full of coloured water. We’d like you to bring a jar of your homemade jam with you and to replace one of the dummy jars. All your tasty preserves will be donated to good causes after the event.

Any and all colours welcome. We’re looking for a rainbow here, apricot through to blackberry, taking in strawberry and greengage en route.

If you’re reading this ahead of Sunday, then you may be able to sneak into a Jamming session we’re holding with restaurant extraordinaire, Cookie. Learn how to make it, listen to a bit of music, take home some of the sweet stuff.

5. To get a Chive Herbcut at the Herbaceous Barbershop.

Art Collective 85A invite you to pop in for a quick trim. Perhaps you’ll use your cuttings to season your soup. Or to liven up your salad. Got absolutely no idea what we’re talking about? Take a look at this picture and perhaps it’ll all become that little bit clearer… Or perhaps it won’t!

Get planting, harvesting and cooking. And tell all your friends to join in too. We’re all looking forward to meeting you.

The NVA team.
www.facebook.com/NVAprojects
www.twitter.com/_NVA_
www.nva.org.uk

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To find out what Tasty twEATS & Harvest 2010, click here.

We’ve got shiny new flyers. See below.

We’ve also got Allotment posters, appearing soon on a noticeboard at an allotment near you. See below.

Plus we’ve got a brand new partnership that’s making us salivate.

NVA & Central Station have teamed up with Landshare and the River Cottage to bring youtwEATs, a live Twitter cook-along.

Back in July, we first told you about twEATs. Now we’re thrilled to be able to announce that Tim Maddam, Head Chef at the River Cottage Canteen and Deli in Axminster, will be taking you step by step through one of his recipes using the power of Twitter.

Some things you’ll need to do if you’d like to join in:

First: keep Monday the 16th free – well need you between the hours of approximately 7 and 8.30pm.

Second: find NVA, River Cottage, Central Station and Landshare on Twitter. Follow us.

Third: take the shopping list we’ll give you next week and go and find the seasonal ingredients you’ll need to make Tim’s mystery dish – if you have a plot then in all likelihood you’ll be able to harvest them.

Fourth: Join Head Chef Tim Maddams on Twitter and cook a River Cottage recipe with him live from his base at theRiver Cottage Store and Canteen in Axminster. Each stage of the recipe will be tweeted (with photos) as it happens. To create the dish at home, just follow Tim’s tweets on the night step by step. If you catch every tweet and twitpic, by 8:30pm you should have made your own delicious River Cottage meal.

We won’t be revealing what you’re making ahead of time, that’s all part of the fun. But it’ll be vegetarian. And you’ll be cooking to share – get your friends round to help you eat it all up.

More info to follow. Make sure you’re following us on Facebook and on Twitter.

While we’re on the subject of twEATs, we’d like to introduce you to Hilary Grant. Hilary’s won the competition to design the recipe booklet for Glasgow Harvest. The limited edition run will contain favourite recipes submitted earlier in the year by growers in return for free plants (see our Flickr group to find out how they’re getting on.) The centre-fold will contain the special River Cottage recipe you’ll all be cooking on the 16th, complete with tweets, re-tweets and pictures from the kitchen. To pick up your copy, come along to Harvest on the 28th August.

TwEATs is being hosted by Central Station as part of Glasgow Harvest, a celebration of food and growing taking place on 28th August in Glasgow. See the NVA website for more information.

NVA on Facebook

NVA on Twitter

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To find out what Tasty twEATS & Harvest 2010, click here.

We are putting together a small team of volunteers to help us out in the run up to Harvest or to help out on the actual day of Glasgow Harvest (or both!) - your chance to be part of, what is really shaping up to be, an utterly brilliant event! We are asking you, our readers and followers, first because we know what a dedicated and loyal team you are! So why not shake things up and really get up close and personal with us?

You will work with our small and friendly team at the NVA office (based near Kelvingrove Park) and be involved in the final preparations for Glasgow Harvest, maybe even getting out and about on a bike and spreading the Glasgow Harvest word far* and wide.

It would be great if you could spare a few days in the run up to Glasgow Harvest (4 or 5 days over the next few weeks) and be available on the 28th August for the actual event.

We will give you some lunch money (just like being back at school!) and reimburse you for any travel within Glasgow, even if you are cycling (yes, cycling).

If you are interested in volunteering with us, please send an email to harvest@nva.org.uk or phone NVA on 0141 3329911.

p.s If you’re part of an allotment or know an allotment who would like to get involved in Glasgow Harvest we have a couple of opportunities involving soup and eccentric shed photography. If you’re interested or would like to know more then get in touch at harvest@nva.org.uk.

*We won’t make you cycle to Edinburgh.

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To find out what Tasty twEATS & Harvest 2010, click here.

In August 2010, Central Station teamed up with NVA, Landshare & River Cottage to bring you a live twitter cook off.

After calling for your grow your own recipe ideas for NVA’s Harvest festival later that month, we then asked designers to put themselves forward to design the a special cookbook/newspaper with all of the recipe ideas. Hilary Grant was our winner and she did a stirling job.

To get everyone’s culinary juices flowing, we had River Cottage’s Head Chef, Tim Maddams, join us over twitter to orchestrate a live cooking event. It rocked. Although not everyone’s meal ended up as tasty as Tim’s, it was a good time had by all.

Below is a more in-depth account of what happened when. Click on the links and re-live the Tasty twEATS!

Central Station are joining up with Landshare and River Cottage to bring you ‘twEATs’ – a live cooking Twitter challenge taking place on the night of 16th August. It’s all for NVA’s Glasgow Harvest, a couple of weeks later at Tramway’s Hidden Gardens on 28th August. If you haven’t read about it yet, it’s a celebration of urban farming aiming to educate and encourage people to grow their own food.

This is our rolling blog, which we update with news, info or just general excitement that we want to share.

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17.08.10

twEATs 2: The Leftovers

The smoke has cleared, the dishes have been collected, there’s a faint tang of lemon and garlic in the air, and all around the country people are looking forward to twEATs 2: The Leftovers – we think it’s fair to say the night was a delicious success.

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12.08.10

Tasty TwEATs Ingredients Revealed

We can now reveal the ingredients for our twEATs event – a live cooking Twitter Challenge- giving you plenty of time to shop and harvest over the weekend.

Have your ingredients ready and be set to start cooking from 7pm!

75g pumpkin seeds
Large bunch of parsley
50g parmesan or matured goat’s cheese, finely grated.
8 courgettes, about 1kg
4 cloves garlic
300ml of rapeseed or extra virgin olive oil
20 basil leaves, cut into strips
Salad leaves for 4
200g crumbly goats cheese
1 lemon
8 thick slices bread
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Hot tip: Have a food processor or blender to hand.

So that’s it. The above will feed 4 lovely friends, if you are cooking for more or less, just adjust to suit. Make sure you follow River Cottage on twitter, and be ready for the cooking instructions to start at 7pm on Monday 16th August. It’s going to be tasty.

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06.08.10

BREAKING NEWS: The chef taking part in twEATs is revealed! We’re incredibly excited to announce that Tim Maddams, Head Chef at River Cottage Axminster Canteen and Deli will be cooking the secret dish on 16th August. Read on…

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twEATs!
You’ve cooked along while watching on telly, you’ve even cooked along to a blog on the net, so now Central Station, Landshare and River Cottage are hosting a live cooking event of our own… on Twitter! To find out the ins and outs, check out our twEATs.

Basically, it looks like this:
- Tim Maddams, Head Chef at River Cottage Axminster Canteen and Deli has selected a dish (vegetarian) from one of their fantastic seasonal recipes for you to cook up.

- Next week the ingredients you will need to cook this mystery recipe will be revealed, giving you a few days to get yourself organised. How you get the ingredients is up to you – you could pick them from your garden, barter with other keen growers for ingredients, visit your local grocer or go out foraging in the wild. What ever floats your boat.

- on the day itself the chef will give step-by-step directions over Twitter  – @rivercottage – on what to do with your ingredients, with the odd picture to keep you on the right track. It’s going to literally be a twitter FEED (see what we did there?)

- you send us your own twEATs and pics as it all happens, letting us know how your culinary skills have held up. And chef will be able to answer any relevant queries as the feed continues. Then we’ll put it all together in an exclusive publication available only at Glasgow Harvest on 28 August.

How can you get involved? We’re glad you asked…

1. Source your ingredients:
In the spirit of NVA and Landshare, we encourage you to find your ingredients locally, if at all possible; perhaps you already have your own windowbox or herb patch, or know of a veggie-growing neighbour who you could trade with. Check out your local farmers’ markets to find a variety of fresh produce, or head out into the countryside yourself, to forage for your food! If you feel inspired to begin growing your own food but don’t have access to a garden, check out Landshare’s programme matching growers with spare land in their area.

2. twEATs aplenty:
This is when you get to eat what you tweet!
Collect together your ingredients and utensils; keep the evening free in your diary, have your computer or phone charged and camera to hand.
Then prepare to cook a dinner you could tweet home about.

3. Go to Harvest:
Pick up a copy of the twEATs’ publication, eat good food, get a punk herb hair-do, check out the jam wall & have a hoot!

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05.08.10
UPDATE: WE HAVE A WINNER!

Central Station is chuffed to announce that Hilary Grant (hilarygrant) is the winner of our twEATs designcompetition.

Here are the winning entries:

POTTED SALAD

and

ICED TEA

Hilary is one half of art collective Edible/Wearable, which she formed with Mahala la May, a fellow student at Duncan of Jordanstone College. Since graduating in 2007, Hilary has designed textiles and accessories for Alexander McQueen, Clare Tough and Tait & Style. She spent the last year working with creative research group Distance Lab and is currently a freelance illustrator and designer.

Angus Farquhar, Creative Director of NVA and one of the judges for our competition said: “I chose Hilary out of a really diverse field with many strong contenders, as I liked her clear and bold style; it is uncomplicated but lively and capable of lifting a simple recipe off the page.”

His fellow judge, Mark Breslin from ISO Design, agreed: “Both of Hilary’s entries have a strong graphic feel, they were really appropriate for the scale and production qualities of the newspaper format. I really liked the contrast between her two entries (yes, two entries – one isn’t enough these days), the first being a sequence of frames illustrating the process, the other a strong single image.”

We can’t wait to see what she does with our limited-edition publication, available only at NVA’s GlasgowHarvest Festival on Sat 28th August.

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NVA:
NVA is a public arts organisation founded in Glasgow in 1992. Our practice is directly engaged in the wider world of urban and rural landscapes. We use a collective approach both in terms of artistic development and also to encourage audiences to participate physically and creatively. We take what is ‘there’ as a starting point to uncover complex underlying realities and to reveal how places shape and are shaped by their inhabitants.

Landshare:
If twEATS and Harvest have got you hankering after the good life, Landshare is the place to find a plot to grow some veggies on. Landshare is an online network where you can look for land to grow veg on, offer their spare land, or get help and tips from Veg Doctors and Helpers supported by Garden Organic, the Royal Horticultural Society and the National Trust.

River Cottage:
Tim Maddams, Head Chef from the River Cottage Axminster Canteen and Deli, will be cooking one of River Cottage’s great seasonal recipes. If you just can’t wait to see what he has chosen, take a peek at some of the fantastic meals in their Everyday Cookbook. Or if you’re passing by, drop in and visit the fantastic new Deli counter at the Axminster Canteen.

This week, we’re thrilled to announce a couple of projects we’re working on with two brilliant arts organisations. For the first time, NVA are collaborating with the rather brilliant arts collective 85A. And we’re re-kindling our partnership with Central Station following the success of White Bikes earlier in the year.

85A’s Herbaceous Barbershop

In the very fine words of 85A:

“A most idealistic and exciting (not to mention tasty!) experience awaits the patrons of 85A’s Herbaceous Barbershop at Glasgow Harvest this summer. Stroll on into our cozy little barbershop, settle yourself into our automated barber’s chair, and select a ‘punk herb cap’ of your choice for your new hair-do…which is both a wicked fashion accessory and most importantly, a darn decent way to maximise growing space in our increasingly over-crowded urban environment. Picture this: You could get your ‘cress Chelsea-cut’ fringe trimmed a little at the front…and then just let the zesty, fresh green clippings tumble right on into your home-grown garden salad!

See you at the Barbershop on the 28th August for a herb-cut with a punk soundtrack and some top seasoning tips. How can one resist? After all, who hasn’t ever wanted a chive Mohawk? Punk appetite!”

You can see how the guys at 85A are getting on here, they’ve been busy uploading images.

For those of you who don’t know them, 85A Collective are an emerging, loose-knit brood of Glasgow based multidisciplinary artists that in recent years have been working alongside and/or supporting one another in various shows and collaborations. Some of these include: ‘The ORZEL Film Experience’ (2009); ‘Der Student von Prag’ (2008) and in August they will be programing the ‘Sonic Soak Festival’ at the Govanhill Baths. For more information see www.85a.org.uk.

Central Station’s twEATs

Apparently twEATs is what you get if you combine cookery and twitter. Of course it is. Central Station and NVA will be inviting all you tweeters to take part in a blind-cooking challenge, using nothing but the power of the Twitter newsfeed and crossed fingers. Central Station are revealing more details over the coming couple of weeks – including details about the chef they’re working with, the ingredients you’ll need to find, a date and a time.

For now, to let us know you’re interested in participating, follow NVA on Twitter and direct message us the word twEATS.

Central Station will be giving away a limited edition run of an illustrated twEATS recipe pamphlet at Harvest on the 28th August, designed by their members (designers: keep your eyes peeled for acall to submit.) First come, first served – make sure you’re at Harvest on the 28th August if you want to get your mitts on one of them.

Stay in touch

Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
See us on Flickr

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To find out what Tasty twEATS & Harvest 2010, click here.

Allotment to Allotment.

Having produced Allotment, an underground shop come bar/ theatrical experiment with NTS for the past year, it is refreshing to be able to work on a real allotment with open blue skies and grass underfoot. I joined NVA last week for the challenge of creating a critical mass and participatory event using urban nooks and crannies to get down and dirty and… grow food!

Kai Fischer, who designed the former arts club has joined me to get green fingered in the Hidden Gardens this summer. Today we had a look around the gardens and were joined by Jack and Becky from 85A (or a bit of Lowsalt), who told us about a number of madcap ideas that we’ll be bringing to life for the project. Think Punk Rock Barbers of herbs, if you can. 2 months to go!

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And in other news, we’re about to launch our Creative Containers challenge. We’ve got three cash prizes to give away on the 28th August at Harvest for the most inventive plant container.

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To find out what Tasty twEATS & Harvest 2010, click here.