Hawkwood Open Day
Sunday 28 September, 12-4pm
This month’s open day at Hawkwood Nursery has a fruity focus as we open our doors for grapes, apples and pears to come in as well as offering salad plants out and sending our chillies on tour.
* Plants for winter – come and get plants to fill your garden with green and nutrition over the coming cold months. Plants for sale include winter salad crop mixes, kale, spinach and chard, broad beans and mixed ‘green manures’ to provide soil fertility and essential ground cover over the winter. As always, growers on hand to support with tips and tales
* Apple and pear pressing – in this fruitful season our horticultural task for the day will be making juice from the apples we have picked through our ‘scrumping’ scheme, to make delicious cider vinegar for next year’s chutney making and salad dressings! If you have an apple or pear tree bearing lots of fruit, this year we are also offering this as a community pressing day – bring your fruit to Hawkwood, we’ll press it together and you take home a share of the juice. Great activity for all ages – drinking the juice fresh from the press is the best thing ever! Please arrive by 2.30 if you’re bringing fruit to juice. [If you are unable to come on Sunday but have surplus fruit in the E17 or E4 area please let us know.]
* Community Wine Scheme: once again this year our community wine scheme will receive grapes from around north London and make them into a red and white wine. Last year 39 households brought 500kg of grapes which were made into 375 bottles of wine! If you grow grapes that you’d like to have made into wine, the open day is one opportunity to bring your grapes, but please contact Marko on mbojcun@yahoo.com first to confirm when it’s best to come (let him know your post code, the expected weight or volume of your harvest, the grape variety, if known, and whether you treat your vines with any sprays). Full details of the scheme here. Sunday is also a chance for last year’s participants to pick up their wine if they haven’t already done so.
With a site tour at 3pm, and soup available for lunch for £3.
All taking place at Hawkwood Nursery, 115 Hawkwood Crescent, E4 7UH. Directions to the site here.
And further afield:
Organiclea’s amazing world of chillies will be joining the ‘Festival of Heat’ Chilli Festival at Spitalfields City Farm (Buxton St, E1, 12-6pm). With demos, tastings, workshops, hot music and all things chilli-related! Find out more at www.thefestivalofheat.co.uk
