Recycling Officers from Oxfordshire district councils will be at the following events, giving out information on recycling at Christmas: Recycling roadshow, Witney Market Square, Thursday 5th December, 11am-3pm Wantage Dickensian Evening, Wantage Town Centre, Friday 6th December, 6-9pm Recycling roadshow, Sainsbury's Witney, Monday 9th December, 11am-3pm Recycling roadshow, Thame Farmers Market, Tuesday 10th December, 8.30am-2.30pm Recycling roadshow, Carterton Co-op, Thursday 12th December, 11am-3pm Recycling roadshow, Abingdon Farmers Market, Friday 20th December, 8.30am-1.30pm Witney Chris ..read more

Becky Lake, the Oxfordshire Waste Partnership’s Communications Officer, has organised a free tour of the new Anaerobic Digestion facility at Cassington, near Eynsham, on Monday 23rd September at 3pm. This is our second AD plant in Oxfordshire, and it’s where some of the district and city councils take their collected food waste. The process produces a gas that is converted to electricity and sent to the Grid, as well as a digestate liquid used by local farmers on their fields. If you’d like to know more, or to book a place on the tour, please contact Becky direct on owp@cherwell-dc.gov.uk ..read more

Left to right: Claire Bell, Moyra Holmes, Jan Holah, Jenny Chambers, Eiles, Sam Clarke, Viccy Hatton, Ailsa Barber, Tessa Hammond and Manda Joyce. Following another successful foundation training session at Garden Organic on 18th and 19th May, our nine new volunteers have hit the ground running. Events already undertaken include: Charlbury Farmers Market Bridewell Organic Open Day ‘Living off the land’ at Millets Farm Garden Centre Activities at East Street Children’s Centre in Banbury Blewbury Festival Seven Roads Open Gardens Weekend in Oxford Leafield Fete Banbury Hobby Horse Fair and Tha ..read more

New MC Sam Clarke sharing composting tips at the recent Seven Roads Open Gardens in Oxford David Garrett at Garden Organic recently asked us to submit our top composting tips for publication in an upcoming Grow Your Own magazine. Oxfordshire Master Composters came up with an impressive response. There was just too much to print, but here is an edited selection of some very good top tips: Security - add your shredded personal documents to the bin as ‘brown’ to balance the ‘green’. For quicker-made compost, place bin in a sunny place, chop up garden waste and mix, adding straw if you don’t hav ..read more

by MC Lynda Smith I started as a volunteer with Leonard Cheshire in Banbury five years ago, helping to run a gardening club for disabled people - all wheelchair users. We call ourselves the Green Wheelies. The first challenge was that the purpose-built residential home had patio gardens - no raised beds! The unseen challenge was that it had been built on a disused car park! As we tried digging into the soil on the patio gardens, we discovered there was only the soil laid down by the contractors - it was one of the Green Wheelies who had to point out to me during our second year that there ..read more

..read more

Look out for your free food caddy liners in the post! We're providing these to everyone in Oxford to increase the amount of food we recycle! pic.twitter.com/tGRzi9LwG7 — Oxford City Council (@OxfordCity) February 20, 2017 At the Master Composter training day last Saturday, Eiles gave us a heads-up about something that's happening across most of Oxfordshire in the next few weeks. In a bid to increase the amount of food waste that is put out for food waste collections - rather than in the landfill bins - councils are sending free food waste caddy liners to residents. There's a little bit about ..read more

Happy holidays everyone! Now that the big day is almost upon us, here's a festive round-up of ways to avoid food waste and turkey fatigue this Christmas! Apparently, Scotland alone is likely to throw away more than 3.5 million mince pies, 240,000 Christmas puddings and the equivalent of over 100,000 turkeys this Christmas - worth a staggering £3 million! Hubbub have got a nice article on freezing your food bills, which encourages good use of the freezer to store those food items that aren't needed immediately. BBC Good Food recommend using leftover cooked vegetables to make Boxing Day soup, w ..read more

There are lots of pumpkin-related activities at the moment, mainly aimed at getting people to recognise pumpkin innards as food! A pumpkin is for dinner, not just for Halloween.... The Oxford Pumpkin Festival is in full swing, with events that continue into November. This weekend (Sat 29th October) a Halloween special at Talking Shop, Sanford is offering a free fancy dress competition and homemade pumpkin soup and pumpkin pie alongside the usual produce market. At Donnington Doorstep Family Centre they're putting on a family fun day and cooking up surplus food, and St Clement’s Family Centre ..read more

Enjoying freshly-pressed apple juice at a Master Composter event in 2009! After a wonderful day at the Garden Organic Volunteers Conference at Ryton, I'm going try and put together some blog posts that I think you might find interesting/useful. For those of you who don't visit the website very often, remember that you can sign up to have new posts delivered to you via email - just pop your address in the box on the right hand side. At this time of year our thoughts turn to how to deal with abundant apple harvests - many of which seem to be left to rot by owners of unappreciated trees. And app ..read more