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.

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.

Led through the cooking of a mystery dish – revealed to be ‘Lemony courgettes on toast with pumpkin seed and parsley pesto’ – by Tim Maddams, Head Chef at Axminister Canteen and Deli, twEATers threw themselves into the spirit of the event with gusto:

“I may have taken too long making sure my ingredients looked just right…”
Credit: @ErinMcElhinney

with roughly 4 minutes before someone began flirting with chef…

Once the “essential preliminary step” had been issued by Tim:

Credit: River Cottage

And dutifully followed:

“Mine’s a g’n't!”
Credit: @glittrgirl

The cooking commenced.

Delicious smells began to rise, of crushed parsley, roasted pumpkin seeds and grated garlic, as the pumpkin seed and parsley pesto took shape:

Credit:@cambusnethanpi

Next came the courgettes, the browning of which caused a bit of drama in one twEATers kitchen:

But by 8pm the vast majority were proudly tucking in to their creations:

Credit: @ErinMcElhinney

Credit: @cmktweets

The verdict was unanimously positive, with clean plates and satisfied groans from all:

as well as several enthusiastic calls for a repeat event:

A huge, huge thanks to Tim, River Cottage, Landshare and NVA, who all worked to make twEATs happen – and to you, for taking part. You can find the recipe Tim used (and more) in the River Cottage Every Day Book.

Now make sure you come along to Glasgow Harvest, NVA’s celebration of urban growing, on 28th August, to pick up your limited edition recipe book, featuring a double page spread on twEATs – you may see your tweets and pics in print!

Credit: NVA

Credit: River Cottage

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

So last Friday I met all the peeps at CenSta. After some long discussions and much file swapping (the legal sort) they sent me off with my brief. I’m designing the layout for the twEATs publication that’s being handed out free (YES! free!) as part of Glasgow’s HArvest Festival.

Central Station has offered me some help from graphic design geniuses ISO- but I’m trying to tame InDesign and do it myself as part of my plan to conquer the entire Adobe Creative Suite. The biggest problem I’ve had with this so far is having to accept that to transform the size of an image you have to hold down “/shift”. It just seems so unnatural not to ”/ T” it!

Today I’ve sent off my work so far to Cen Sta to get some feedback and advice from ISO. Looking forward to hearing what they have to say.

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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.

I’ll be designing the layout and illustrating the front, back and centrefold and including the lovely artworks that people have submitted to be in the publication. The centrefold is going to be an illustrated recipe, twEATed live by Tim Maddam, Head Chef at River Cottage Axminster Canteen and Deli on the 16th of August as part of Glasgow’s Harvest Festival. I’ve been in the Central Station headquarters looking through all the other submissions and feel really lucky to be chosen. Well done to everyone who submitted their beautiful illustrations!

Thank you so much to Central Station, NVA, River Cottage and Landshare for asking me to be involved- it’s going to be a really fun project and can’t wait to get started. Look out for more posts and pictures to follow soon.

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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.

Can we tempt you to join our Jam Dating Agency? [Yes, you read that right.]

We’re looking people to pair with one another. Are you:

i) eager to make jam?

ii) looking at a bumper harvest this year?

Here’s the idea – it’s really very simple – let us hook up the makers with the producers.

All you have to do is tell us what you’ve got or what you’re looking for. At the moment we’ve got three young ladies who have jars on the hunt for locally grown produce. Come on people with (soon-to-be-heaving) plum trees and over-enthusiastic fruit patches – start sharing your wares!

Don’t worry if you’re an enthusiastic new-comer and your skills in the art of jam-making are as yet untested. It’s ever so easy, anyone can do it. To help point you in the right direction, here are a few top tips we’ve spotted:

Nigel Slater on the art and pleasure of jam-making.

Jamie Oliver’s strawberry and vanilla concoction.

The River Cottage community’s Gingered Courgette pot of gold.

Once you’ve made your jam, if you live anywhere near Glasgow then we’d like you to bring a pot along to Harvest 2010. On the 28th August at the Hidden Gardens, we’re hosting a mass open-air meal. As part of it we’re building a Jam Wall. A 3D pantone colour chart of jam jars, ranging from [lemon]yellow to black[current]. Bring your concoction with you and add it to our ever-growing communal sculpture.

Coming soon: find out about some of the work we’re commissioning for Glasgow Harvest 2010, including multidisciplinary art collective 85A’s Herbaceous Barbershop and photographer Neil Davidson’s Shed.

Follow us on Twitter.

Like us on Facebook.

See us on Flickr.

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