We ran a little competition in our weekly email newsletter a couple of weeks ago to doodle on the label of June's smoothie of the month. Our Ben's just had a look over all the entries (you can see them all here) and decided on his three favourites. Which in no particular order are...
jomrpicklemolloy"Everyone went ‘ooo’ at this one. we think the birds make it, and the grass skirt."
sueappleton60's not so innocent desert island "Lots of brownie points here for pre-sketching in pencil. Preparation."
and creative_one"Nice use of felt tips, and we like milky joe too."
A box of smoothies goes to each of the winners. Keep an eye on your inbox for even more chances to win stuff.
Along with a few other thousand revellers, our Lucie went along to Glastonbury last weekend for a spot of festival living, falafel munching and Jay Z appreciating.
While she was there, she spotted this brilliant little tent/igloo structure in the Green Fields
It's made completely from used tetra cartons and some very bendy twigs.
On closer inspection, Lucie discovered a couple of rather familiar looking panels inside
Hats off to whoever made this ingenious recycled tetra tent. We salute you.
Every now and again we like to give you an on the ground update from our innocent foundation partners. Some of you may already know that 10% of innocent's profits go to charity each year, primarily to the innocent foundation, but it's individual stories like this one which really remind us of why we do this. The foundation is currently supporting work in South Sudan through FARM-Africa. The people of Sudan have had it really rough through being displaced through conflict, but they're working hard to rebuild their lives and reduce their reliance on food aid.
Amou Mariec Aweer (above) lost her husband in the conflict and her cows and goats were raided by her neighbours. She returned to her home village with nothing, but in 2007 she received training and 5 goats from her local FARM-Africa team. Now she has a flock of 8 goats and in time she will return 5 to the project to re-stock other families. She is now known as Mama Five Goats and this says it all:
“Now people are respecting me in their meetings because I also have goats like them. They no longer call me a poor woman. My life has changed, I am a woman now”.
Her newest goat kid is called Malith, which means spotted colour in Dinka, as animals are often named according to their colour. We wish luck to Mama Five Goats and all her goats.
Our Bronte (standing, far right) popped around yesterday to help us enjoy a Scandinavian themed cheese club. She's a bit of an expert on all things Scandinavian, being from Denmark herself, and also starting her very own Scandinavian Kitchen last year.
You can read all about yesterday's Scandinavian cheese club and the cheeses Bronte brought along for us on her own blog here.
We're hoping that you might be able to help spread the word about our village fete this summer in your local neighbourhood or place of work. All you need to do is download this post, print it out and stick it up somewhere where lots of people might see it.
Then you can take a photo of it and enter it into our flickr competition if you like. There'll be prizes for best placed poster, the strangest placed poster and the place where the most people are likely to see it.
A very kind drinker brought us a present last week when they popped into Fruit Towers
Speculoos is the spreadable version of those little biscuits you get with your coffee in posh coffee shops.
Those little biscuits are techincally known as speculaas and are a traditionally eaten on 5th December in Belgium and the Netherlands to celebrate St. Nicholas' Eve.
Seeing as biscuits last about 3 minutes in our kitchen, the biscuit spread has gone down a storm and has overtaken chocolate spread as the choice of topping for 3:30pm toast munchies.
Alternatively, it tastes just as good straight from the jar.
Yesterday, Fordy taught me how to fix a puncture properly and enlightened me as to how far puncture repair kits have advanced since I last got someone else to fix my bike.
No more glue, funny little rubber circles or scrubby bits of chalk.
Just a postage stamp sized patch that you peel off and stick over the offending hole.
Small enough to fit in your pocket yet strong enough to stop that air escaping from your tyres.
Laura from Sharnbrook Upper School got in contact to let us know that the Young Enterprise Group she's part of have made it through to the Young Enterprise National Finals with their company, Green Elephant.
They've published a little book for children, which is all about encouraging them to eat more healthily.
The book has some great healthy recipes in there and some nice illustrations, drawn by Michael who's also in the group.
The finals are today so fingers crossed for Green Elephant and Ollie the mouse coming up trumps.
Before you start writing in about the variation in shading, the bottle shadow or the hidden netball, there's actually only one difference, which all eagle eyed Dutch speakers will have clocked straightaway - namely, that our recipe book is now available in Dutch.
Hot off the press, it will make a lovely present for all your Dutch friends, neighbours, colleagues and football coaches and you can get it here, here, here, here and here.
Here's a very sneak preview of the innocent band who played for us here at Fruit Towers last Thursday lunch time. They'll be playing again at our village fete on both the Saturday and Sunday so keep your eye out for them on the programme.
Every single member works here Monday to Friday, 9am-6pm, so we're quite proud that they've managed to pull together a fully fledged 9 piece band in such a short space of time. In the blurry distance, you can probably just about make out Caroline, Cass, Ceri and Vic on vocals, Duncan on drums, Jamie M and Tim S on trombone and trumpet respectively, Ruvan on guitar, Malinna on bass and Ben T working his magic on the piano. Oh and there's a tambourine that gets passed around as well. We can't forget the tambourine.
And here's a chicken with his eye on some apples.
Unfortunately, he's already been booked for another engagement this summer.
On Wednesday we got an email from office favourite Siobhan. She's much loved here at Fruit Towers for her top notch fruit buying skills and feats of physical endurance.
She's currently doing a mammoth cycle ride from Land's End to John O'Groats all in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support. You can read more here. Apparently her favourite cycling buddy is 'Big Bear Grits', a Latvian carpenter with mighty thighs. She reports that she has so far avoided getting acutely saddle sore and the temptation to get married to said carpenter in Gretna Green.
Here's Siobhan and crew at Land's End (our hero is on the far right).
Siobhan Linard. Legend in her own life time. Doing it for us so we don't have to (and so we can eat crisps and have a lie in this weekend).
They work with communities in rural Kenya to help improve water supplies, food production, health standards and generate income using environmental and sustainable methods. Back in February, our Graham went to visit one of their projects which you can read a bit more about here.
Last week, the Excellent Development team scooped an award for Environmental Charity of the Year at the Charity Awards.
And if that wasn't enough, they then went on to be crowned overall Charity of the Year from a shortlist of thirty other organisations.
It's great to see recognition for the fantastic work they do improving people's lives through sustainable development and nice to see that they all scrub up a treat too.
The nice people at Friends of the Earth have just published a handy, new guide to stopping climate change.
It's packed full of easy-to-understand facts and simple tips to help make life better for you, the planet and your pocket.
They're very kindly giving away a copy of this helpful, little book to the 5 lucky people who can tell us how they like to do their bit for the planet.
It's as simple as that.
Deadline for entries is Monday 30th June so get doing and get posting.
You might have seen our new smoothie of the month - mangoes, coconuts and lemongrass - in a shop near you. It's got a nice drawing of a little desert island, lovingly crafted by our designer, Kat.
However, the island is looking slightly bare at the moment, so we'd like it if you can have a go at populating it.
Ben W and Simon K have already done a couple of examples to give you some inspiration.
This is Bear Island by Ben (age 22)
And this Simon's interpretation of the island out of Jurassic Park (minus Jeff Goldblum. Simon couldn't get his hair right)
All you need to do is buy a bottle, get doodling and upload your creation to our flickr site by 1st July 2008. The best three doodles will win some smoothies and an art related prize of some description.
This recipe is only around for a couple more weeks though, so like a well dressed crocodile, make it snappy and get drawing.
We've just come across this blog post by a clever guy called Michael who specialises in speed reading and accelerated learning techniques. He's really good at it and could probably read this whole page from top to bottom in a just a few seconds. Like that bit in The Matrix.
Anyway he came across one of our labels (above), where we mixed all the letters up but you can still kind of read it, and thought it was interesting so has broken the science behind it down a bit. Tnakhs for yuor knid wrods Mcehail.
Ceri found a lovely example of some local marketing at our nearest pub the other day. Then on my lunchtime stroll today I came across this sign for our friends at Brackenbury Primary School's Summer Fair this Saturday (literally a stone, or stray tennis balls, throw away from Fruit Towers) .
Their Summer Fair is being supported by the local estate agent by the look of it so they've come up with the very nifty idea of sticking up estate agent signs with the children's own art work advertising the event.
If you'd like to advertise your own school/ WI/ cricket club/ any other type of fete or fair, or to find the nearest ones to you this summer pop over to our fete finder.
David, Tom, Louise and Sarah from method popped in yesterday to tell us a bit more about what they do and to see what we could learn from each other.
If you've not come across method before, they make lovely smelling, eco friendly cleaning products which don't contain any horrible chemicals or toxic substances, are kind to the planet and clean your house up a treat.
They very nicely brought along some of their new products for us to try out and a special recycled goodie bag to give away. It contains a copy of their brand new book Squeaky Green (which isn't out properly for another couple of weeks) as well as a sackful of green, cleaning stuff for your house.
To win the goodie bag, all you need to do is tell us what your 'dirty little cleaning secret' is by next Monday and then Tom from method will pick the best answer.
Don't forget to keep it cleaning related, though. There's mucky and then there's just plain rude.
Round the corner from where we work, The Thatched House pub has a lovely little thing going on.
Everyday, they write up a different street name in the local area on their blackboard and if you can prove you live on that street, you get a free drink on the house.
Simple as that.
It's a small but charming way of making people feel part of a community and a great excuse to get to know the neighbours and have a bit of a knees up.
Preston and Malin, two of Brackenbury Primary School's finest who came to visit us this very afternoon.
They'd both had a really busy week preparing for 'Proms in the Playground' hence the rather natty head gear. Malin intends to spend the weekend 'just chilling' and Preston is excited about a prospective trip to see 'The Lord of the Rings'. Two fine ideas for those of you still lacking plans for the weekend.
Last week the pupils at All Saints' School in Putney ran a smoothie workshop, to learn more about different fruits and nutrition. They tasted a few of our recipes, and had to guess what ingredients were in each of them.
Those with untrained tastebuds can find this a bit challenging, but one bright spark managed to identify guava in one of our Superfood smoothie recipes.
You may remember back in April we waved goodbye to our Andrew and packed him off to Malawi to visit and help out at an innocent foundation project. Well as the culmination of his trip he has just finished editing a short film about his experience. And here it is. It's well worth watching to the very end if only to witness his unique dancing talents.
Mark Stevenson on spreadable biscuits anyone?
Patricia on spreadable biscuits anyone?
Dodie on doodle things and win stuff
Dodie on bit of a thickie
Robyn on spreadable biscuits anyone?
Julia V on do your bit (and win stuff)
White Tea on put the kettle on
Ian on spreadable biscuits anyone?
Row at innocent on spreadable biscuits anyone?