best in show

Back in March, our SJ and her partner, Steph, took over a half plot on the Granville Park allotment site.

Their plot was overgrown, very weedy and in need of some love (and a lot of digging).

Fast forward lots of hard graft to August and it’s now bursting with fruit, veg and a smart new shed.

 

Last weekend, SJ and Steph entered their finest cauliflower (back row, second along), some courgettes and a giant potato into the annual Granville Allotment competition. 

Sadly, they didn’t win any prizes (mainly because the board was swept by old timers Derek, Sue (best flowers) and Granville (onions) but they got to pick up loads of tips, learn just how big an onion can grow and taste a lot of homemade jam.

This is Granville's winning onion (his name has no influence over the competition whatsoever. Allegedly)

 

Steph did win the 'Guess the Weight of the Cake' cake, correctly guessing it weighted 6.2kg.

So they didn’t go home empty handed.

Granville Park have been so impressed with SJ and Steph's efforts that they've since given them the other half plot next to theirs to tend.

Both SJ and Steph are now busy planning what to plant for next year, reading The Little Book of Slugs and figuring out how to whup Granville in  'Best Onion' next year.

If you're a green fingered sort and have any top tips on anything from broad bean husbandry through to clever planting or raised beds made easy, please post your tips below and SJ will try the best ones out.

You might even get a special invite along to next year's show (or a pot of homemade jam) by way of thanks.

cook-a-long

Not sure what cook for dinner to tonight?

Need something to whet your appetite?

Why not feast your eyes on these short but informative videos of the excellent Anna Jones (who helped us come up with the recipes for our new book, Hungry?) and some short but exceptionally talented commis chefs making some of the recipes out the book?

Veggie burgers for mains

Accompanied by a tasty chop chop salad

And finished off with a fruit mess.

x

Which is exactly what is sounds like.

Happy watching, cooking and most importantly, eating.

the walls are alive

With some very fine tomatoes.

In just 10 days time, we're opening the doors to our 5 for 5 cafe and we're pulling together the final touches.

Along with some of the finest vegetarian fare for miles around, our cafe is going to feature a number of very special walls. Move over brickwork, breezeblocks and MDF - walls of fruit and veg are the way forward.

Our friend Rob at Rocket Gardens has been busy in his wood shed knocking together some frames for our living walls.

Here they are being loaded onto Rob's very snazzy blue tractor.

 

And here they are full of tomato plants, all ready for the journey up to London and their debut at The Tramshed.

There's still a giant wall of Little Gems to come.

Lettuce pray it arrives on time.

To book your spot at the cafe and to see the walls with your very own eyes, just click here.

come along to our cafe

We're going to be opening a little cafe in Shoreditch, East London for 7 days this October and we'd love you to come along.

 

We've called it the innocent 5 for 5 cafe because from the 1st - 8th October (closed Monday 4th), we're aiming to serve 5,000 people their 5-a-day for a fiver.

Which is 25,000 portions of fruit and veg.

 
 

For just £5, you can choose a 2 course lunch or dinner from a tasty menu which has been specially designed by our guest chef, Gizzi Erskine.

  

We've got a special kids menu too and a handy takeaway hatch round the side where you can pick up a veg pot and smoothie for £5 if you've only time for lunch on-the-go.

 
 

The 5 for 5 cafe is bookings only, so to bagsy yourself a seat or find out a bit more, just click here and we'll hopefully see you down the cafe.

a shed, some veg and lots of busy bees

It's not all spreadsheets and calculators in the merry land of innocent finance.

Last week, the whole Finance team spent a day at Kew Riverside Primary School helping the children to build an allotment on the school field so that they can grow their own veg and maybe some bee friendly flowers. Next thing you know they'll be putting the veg in pots (that rings a bell).

 
But it wasn't all gardening. We also did a spot of shed building too with Rob and Lynne (crowned master shed builders). 

We thought the shed would be handy for storing all the gardening tools but the children thought it was more useful for a sneaky game of 'How many people can you fit in a shed at one time without it falling over?'. If anyone is interested the record so far is 10.

And with the help of lots of little hands (sorry about the paint on their school uniforms) we transformed a plain old boring white wall...

... into a beautiful mural that the children designed.

That's Roberta in the red T shirt. She's in the Finance team and not a pupil in case anyone was unsure.

We figure friendly finance folk couldn't have done any of this without the amazing help of Gareth Miller from the Open Living Company and Paul Munckenbeck from M&S Power Hire. They both donated their time, expertise and lots of materials to our little project at no cost.

They kept us on track on the day and rallied their suppliers to help as well.

Big thanks also go to John at Brewers for the paint, everyone at Alsfords for the timber and Nick from Motive8 for putting us in touch with Gareth.

Here's Gareth and Paul looking tired but happy after a hard day's work. They aren't used to grafting.

 

Paul even let Lou B (aka The Stig) have a go on his digger.

Thanks to Debbie and everyone at Kew Riverside Primary School.  Maybe you could all drop in to see us at Fruit Towers one day? 

 

We'll send a grassy van round to pick you up.

vegetable vision

Those of you who have ever tried our tasty new veg pots might have noticed the veg art photos decorating the inside of the label. We've got a bit of an ongoing competition with those photos, if you add your best vegetable based photos to this flickr group we'll then print our favourites inside our veg pots. Meaning you get your creative excellence in front of thousands of people. The only guidelines being that your photo should show beautiful vegetables, and also have a slight sense of humour.

Here's a few examples of some veg art we like, just to get you inspired. We've got a veg pot packaging refresh coming up so if you get something in quick you could see your work in the shops quite soon.

And in other creative photo news our Emma Hines won the weekly Times travel photo competition last week for a very colourful picture she took while out trekking in Vietnam. Well done Em.

veg pots - an update

It's been a bit busy in veg pot land recently. To be honest, they're selling better than we could have imagined, so most of our time is taken up with making more. But we just wanted to quickly let you know what's happening in a few areas, and reply to all of the comments (mainly in response to this post) in one fell swoop.

Where you can buy them:

- We're in about two thirds of all Waitrose stores. They decide which stores (not us), so if they're not in your local store or they've sold out, please ask a Waitrose person to order you some.

- We're also in a lot of Sainsbury's main stores now (as of 3 weeks ago) and will be in many Sainsbury's Local stores from November.

- We'll be in Tesco from the end of December, and we're working on other places as we speak.

- In Northern Ireland we're currently only in a few stores – Sainsbury's in Forestside, Holywood Exchange, Sprucefield, Newry and Dungannon. We're working on the rest.

Vegan/Vegetarian:

We've had lots of vegans asking us to make a vegan recipe. If you eat honey then you can eat the Moroccan recipe. Otherwise, none of them are suitable for vegans. The good news is we are working on a solution. The bad news is that it may take us a couple of months to get it made and into the shops, but should be out early next year.

Vegetarians - three of the recipes are suitable for vegetarians. The Thai one isn't because it has fish sauce in.

We tried loads of ingredients instead of the fish sauce, because we'd rather everyone could eat it, but it made such a difference to the taste that we stayed with the traditional ingredient.

Some people hadn't seen this on the packaging so we've changed the packaging to make it clear on the top that it contains fish sauce. And we take your point about the 'not suitable for strict vegetarians' comment, that was rubbish, we've changed that too. It should take a month for new packaging to be in the shops.

Dairy-free/Wheat-free:

A couple of you asked for dairy-free versions. The Thai and the Moroccan are dairy-free.

The Thai and the Pea & Rice recipes are wheat-free.

Price:

We're funding a lower launch price to start with because it's a bit cheeky to ask people to pay full price for a product they haven't tried yet. This is also why we put up some sampling stands, which you may have seen in Sainsbury's or Waitrose/John Lewis stores, so people can try before they buy. After this time, the veg pots do go back up to the full price of £3.49. The price is driven by the amount and quality of the ingredients and we don't want to make them worse to make them cheaper. We're going to stick with these products for now, but we'll try to have them on regular offers so you can get some cheaper ones or try new flavours.

Recipe suggestions:

Thank you for all the recipe comments. It seems that people like the four launch recipes on the whole, but we're definitely listening to what you say and we're making some tweaks. We'd better get on with it.

Of course, if there's anything else you need to know about our veg pots, then just post a comment and we'll try to answer.

what did you think?

Have you had a chance to try our new veg pots yet?

It’s the first time we’ve made things with veg so we’d love to know what you think of them. Any feedback you have on the specific recipes would be welcomed with open arms so that we can make them the best little veg pots they can be.

- Do you like our veg pots? Are they useful? Is there anything we could do to make them better?

- When do you eat them? Home or office? On their own or with something?

- What did you think of the specific recipe you tried? 10 out of 10 brilliant, or 0 out of 10 disastrous? How could it be better?

Just in case...we want as many people as possible to enjoy our veg pots. So we're now working on some vegan options as well after taking on your feedback from when we first introduced our veg pots to you.

win ten veg pots

For a chance to win ten whole tasty innocent veg pots just answer the below question as a comment to this blog post by 6pm on Monday 29th September. We'll then choose 1 winner at random first thing on Tuesday and drop you a line. Easy as that.

Which of these ingredients would you not find in a veg pot?
Carrot
Pak choi
Fondant fancy

UPDATE: This competition has now closed. The winner chosen at random was Rebecca G-W. Well done Rebecca, we're going to send you an email to arrange getting the ten veg pots to you.

If you fancy hedging your bets we've got some very special batteries up for grabs here at the minute as well.

vegetable vision

What with our first venture outside the world of fruit into vegetables, with our brand new tasty veg pots, we've been getting into all things veg-like at the minute. As such, we've started up our own veg art gallery.

You can see a few examples of our own handiwork above and here but we'd love it if you could join in too. Along with getting involved with the best gallery type affair since Tony Hart and Morph graced our screens (the good old days eh Row) you'll get a special prize that might well be vegetable related. Plus the fame of having your picture printed big and in colour on the inside of millions of our veg pots packaging if we choose your shot, just like this...

Your photo could appear on the inside bit here, where the cherry tomato Pac Man is.

Have a look for some inspiration, read the simple guidelines and get uploading at our veg art flickr group here.