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.

It’s a joy to see a building project reach completion and come alive; walking onto the SAGE growing site in Possilpark, the drawings that we have pored over for months have become a reality. There are black growing cubes of various sizes set out neatly on what was previously a derelict patch of ground wedged between St Matthews Church and Allied Vehicles. The surroundings haven’t changed significantly; there’s still concrete under foot and accumulation of rubbish around the perimeter, but during the day we took the next step towards transforming this Concrete Garden into a living, growing place. The day was about planting and bringing the idea of “SAGE (Sow and Grow Everywhere)” alive… ok this isn’t “Everywhere”, but it’s certainly somewhere.

Plug plants have been grown especially for the garden; I ought to surround the term “Plug Plants” with inverted commas because like me, some readers may not be horticulturalists, or even gardeners; excuse me the vulgarity of stealing a description from the interweb of knowledge… “a plug plant is any developing plant whose growth cycle is initiated well in advance of its actual planting”… basically they’re little veg waiting to become big veg.

The site has a cubic aesthetic, and so we planted vegetable plugs in straight lines, squares and rectangles. We do not dare plant in curves for fear of suffering the wrath of the site’s designer, Rolf “The Cube” Roscher. And yet the site’s design suits its urban surrounding well. It might look out of place in open country, but in the city it’s a marriage of urbanism and the natural form. And it will be much easier to work out which plant is which if there is some regularity in their planting.

Later on in the evening we were joined by a gaggle of children and teenagers from the nearby Depot Arts organisation; the younger ones ready to throw themselves into any activity that involved getting dirt on knees and between fingernails; some of the older ones bearing immaculate nails and threatening sickness if their fragile skin comes in contact with manure; we planted potatoes together and the stench was forgotten. I remembered I was fortunate to have had contact with gardening activity as a youngster; admittedly this involved much wonder about why my parents spent SO much time in their beloved back garden rather than riding the flumes at Chessington World of Adventures; but now I really appreciate the context and the love of productive countryside that it has instilled in me. With kids, plugs and cubes, the urban food growing adventure has taken its next step, at least in this small corner of North Glasgow.

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