Adopt A Growbox: Make The City Blossom

WE GOING to get our fingers dirty for Manchester.

So if we can do it - between eating out all the time and reporting on lunches and dinners - why can't you?

We want to bring colour and flavour to the city in the form of a grow box filled with life and zest and herbs and flowers. 

We've booked a yellow box, just like the Confidential homepage, and we can't wait to get out the trowel and compost and search the streets for handy manure. 

So if we can do it - between eating out all the time and reporting on lunches and dinners - why can't you?

The Mark Addy’s Executive Head Chef, Robert Owen Brown, has. He was the first to adopt a grow box. It makes sense for a chef to do this. He can grow a bit of veg for the Addy pot.

Good lad. 

Robert Owen Brown on the right

Anyway here's the story.

Forty wooden planters, known as grow boxes, in a range of bright colours are available to adopt in the new Garden City garden on Victoria Street next to Manchester Cathedral. 

Green-fingered city centre residents and businesses can sign up to use them free of charge to grow their own fruit, herbs and vegetables this summer.

The new public space next to Manchester Cathedral, which opened last month, also includes the city centre’s first children’s play area, with a sandpit and wooden play apparatus including a see-saw, snake balancing beam, rope climbing frame and stepping logs.   

This Manchester Garden City scheme, led by city centre management company CityCo, design agency BDP and Groundwork, is jointly funded by CityCo, Manchester City Council and Manchester Cathedral.  The Cathedral’s volunteering groups will maintain the site. 

Victoria Street is the sixth Manchester Garden City scheme - a project that aims to make the city greener. Others include canal-side planting in Piccadilly Basin, Grow Boxes on Dale Street car park, the orchard in St John’s Gardens, a Northern Quarter pocket park on Thomas Street and the revamped Albert Bridge Gardens. 

Interested companies or individuals should email gardencity@cityco.com for details. For more information visit www.cityco.com.

You can follow Jonathan Schofield on Twitter here @JonathSchofield or connect via Google+

Grow box grow