Friday 23 July 2010

City fruit and veg


After a wander round Borough Market, I can highly recommend popping into the Union Street Urban Orchard which is empty of tourists and full of fruit trees, flowers and birds.
Borough Market is great for sampling food treats - cheeses, salamis, sauces and marvelling at beautiful, pile-em-high vegetable displays. But the price tags are exorbitant: can you imagine paying £2 for a single tomato? Well, I did, (surely the world's most expensive?) - my excuse is that I was seduced by childhood memories of Italian markets and misshapen ripe pommodori that tasted of sunshine. This one, sadly didn't live up to my expectations. But it did make me want to rush out and order my seeds for next year.
So it was good to see some real food growing in the Orchard, a temporary community garden nestling alongside some railway arches. The high walls make a perfect sheltered garden and it's a welcome pocket of greenery in a very built up area. In assorted containers - pallets, hessian sacks, stacks of truck tyres - there are peaches ripening, apples, a cider shed awaiting the harvest, courgettes flourishing and summer bright geraniums, and pansies recycled from the Pansy Project garden at Hampton Court.  It's a great use of an otherwise empty site, built as part of the London Festival of Architecture just for this summer. And after September, all the plants are going to be redistributed around community gardens and plots in the area, by the wonderfully named Wayward Plants project.

10 comments:

  1. thanks for this - must pop down and pay a visit. I avoid Borough Market because of the price tags - too tempting for my purse strings.

    Laura

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  2. Sounds great! I'd never heard of the Union Street Urban Orchard before but will be off to check it out sometime soon!!

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  3. the places you profile are all so lovely--i wish we had things like this here in boise.

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  4. Okay, now I'm excited! I didn't know about this place (I usually wander over to Bermondsey rather than back into Southwark) but looks like there's loads of inspiration and ideas to copy down there. Big thanks for flagging this up, will defo pop down some time soon...

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  5. a little oasis looks lovely.

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  6. £2 for a tomato? Are you crazy???? And why is nobody else surprised by the expenditure?

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  7. Yes, Hopper, it was indeed a moment of insanity. I didn't look back over my shoulder to see how much they were laughing at me.
    Laura - I shall be following your example in future and avoiding Borough market for a while...
    Caro and Amy - let me know what you think of the Orchard, when you've been.
    Damo - it's a great place to bring kids if you're visiting London.
    And Emily - I'm sure you have some amazing stuff in Idaho that I would love to see. All that space, that we can only dream of in our tiny country.

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  8. I have a tactic with BM. It's in - cheese and foie gras - out again. I even use the same stalls because they know me and I get a proper price. The rest of it I avoid like the plague.

    Must seek out the orchard, though!

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  9. Ah yes, IG, I like your guerilla approach. I have to confess that I also bought the world's most expensive chorizo - the happy pig story was the beginning of the clouding of my (normally very tight)financial judgement. Next time I will barter. So can we expect to see you selling courgettes there in future?

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  10. thanks so much for posting about this - I haven't been along to borough market for a couple of months, and that project looks like so much fun!

    Isabel
    www.fennelandfern.co.uk

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