Coming up on October 24th is the 350 Spring Food Festival. It's happening in conjunction with the Otago Farmers Market, down at the train station. 350 is part of a global day of action centred around awareness raising about climate change. The number '350' refers to the threshold of CO2 (in 'parts per million') that we can safely have in the atmosphere without risking serious climate chaos. Unfortunately we're already at 382 ppm so the whole world needs to act fast to turn this around.

Many places around the world are doing things related to the number 350. Such as 350 people making a picture, a bunch of sheep in a paddock herded into the shape of 350, and so on. But here in Dunedin the 350 organising crew decided to take a somewhat more practical approach to the day, and turn it into an event that will not only be a lot of fun, but will also have real outcomes and benefits towards Dunedin city getting closer to achieving reduced CO2 emissions.

Otepoti Urban Organics will be there with our seed stall. And we're also teaming up once again with Students for Environmental action to bring you a new, improved, and more epic than ever before multi-thousand seedling giveaway! The seeds are coming direct from OUO's seed bank so it'll give a lot of people a chance to test out our wild and whackey vegetable strains.

Max and I are working on securing some greenhouse space at the polytech, but its going to be a lot of work, and we're going to need help. Some stuff we need includes:
-Help with planting seeds in the next few weeks
-Any spare seed trays / things that can be used as seed trays
-Extra glasshouse space...if you've got a glasshouse with some spare space in it, that could be useful. What would be especially cool is if you were willing for us to give you a tray or two, some soil and some seeds and you plant them up, water them and bring them along on October 24th. The more people that do this the less crazy frantic we will be! And we'll give you a few free veggie seeds to keep for yourself in exchange for your awesome work.
-Voulnteers on the day to help give out seedlings, and help people with any questions they may have (usually pretty basic stuff but a bit of gardening knowledge would certainly help with this)

In addition to this, there are several gardening workshops that are to be occurring throughout the day, to teach people about various aspects of vegetable gardening. If you'd like to volunteer at one of these workshops, or even co-ordinate one yourself, please drop me a line!

To find out more about 350 in general, go to http://www.350.org.nz/ . You can sign up for the Dunedin 350 email list and be kept up to date with whats going on by emailing: dunedin350@gmail.com