Honest Tea Mobile City Garden
This is a temporary community garden in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It’s a space where the local community can meet, connect with nature, learn new skills and grow organic food. They run workshops and training programme.
Community gardens have been springing up all over London in the last few years. Local groups have been working with property developers to use parcels of land and open spaces to create little green oasis in the middle of our crowded city.
I visited the Mobile Garden City in Stratford to see the launch of the new initiative between organic beverage company, Honest Tea and Groundwork.
Julia Bradbury was there to launch this new partnership with a talk to remind us that communing with nature is good for our health if not our soul. Us city dwellers have lost touch with nature and the seasons. With these community gardens, people who live in concrete boxes have the opportunity to have some green space to use and live in.
Honest Tea is an organic beverage company that started in a kitchen in Bethesda, MD. Started by Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff, they wanted to offer a refreshing drink with less sugar and the result is this iced tea. They added flavours like pomegranate and honey. On that hot day gardening, it was just the right cooling drink to have.
This is a temporary community garden in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It’s a space where the local community can meet, connect with nature, learn new skills and grow organic food. They run workshops and training programme.

This garden is staffed by a few gardeners and a lot of local volunteers. Anyone can pop along and help them grow, weed or harvest.
Since it was Friday, harvest day, we had a go at harvesting big thick stalks of rhubarb grown in recycled planters. The helpful volunteers are on hand to give you pointers on where to snip and how much to harvest without killing off the plants.
The plot of land might not be very big but it is planted with over 450 plants including borage, rainbow chard, sweet peas, squash, tomatoes, spinach, beans and nasturtium peas. All the food that is grown here is organic. Besides just growing food for the community, they sell some of the harvests to local restaurants too.
Recycling and Upcycling Drinks Bottles
As Honest Tea’s ethos is to be organic and sustainable, their bottles are actually made from renewable plant material and recycled plastic. We had a lesson on turning these used bottles into some hanging planters. You can easily get crafty too and make some yourself. Just follow the steps below.
How to make a hanging planter from a recycled plastic bottle
- Firstly, you cut into the bottle with the size that you want, leaving about an inch to cut into petals.
- Divide the circle and cut petals into the plastic.
- Bend the petals back.
- Cut 4 pieces of string equal lengths, about 1m long.
- Tie each string around the bottle lid with a knot. Evenly space out each string.
- Catch the 2 loose ends and tie them around one petal, make a double knot to hold in place.
- Catch all the loose ends and tie a loose knot. This is to be used for hanging.
- Your pot is done. You can now fill it with the plant of your choice.
- If you like, you can paint it, add stickers or whatever else you want to make your hanging plant prettier.
An Energy Garden.
The Mobile Garden City is also an energy garden. They work with a social enterprise that uses these open spaces to instal solar panels. The energy generated is used in the garden and any excess is sold on. The proceeds are used to benefit the community.
This is run as a social enterprise and they are looking to work with lots more communities around the country. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to generate energy from a bit of wasteland and also benefit the local community?
They will be moving from this plot in September, as it’s due to be developed, to somewhere close by. There are more of these gardens springing up all over London. Pop down to one of these and learn some new skills. You can even take home some local, organic veg too.
The Mobile Garden City is located on the corner of Temple Mills Lane and Honour Lea Avenue on Chobham Manor, near Chobham Academy.
EatCookExplore was a guest of Honest Tea