THE best mixed salad in Islington is grown in a poly-tunnel behind the Tufnell Park Estate.

Lettuce, rocket, fennel, radishes, mizuna – mustardy Japanese greens – garlic chives, broad beans and edible flowers, all tastier than anything you’d buy in plastic at the supermarket, are sprouting in a small community plant nursery off the Holloway Road.

“We’re not only growing food in the spring and summer months,” explained senior gardener Billy Styles.

“You can be eating fresh produce all year round.”

The plant nursery – so-called because plants are propagated there to be distributed and grown in other community gardens – is run by Octopus Communities, a collaboration of Islington’s 14 largest community centres.

Along with Octopus’s own gardeners, the nursery is maintained by volunteers who spend Wednesday mornings planting, pruning, picking or – as when the Tribune visited – cleaning garden tools, and occasionally get to take home the herbs and greens they have grown.

There are also sessions with students from Beacon High and a group from Mencap, and the garden produces food for Tufnell Park church St George’s.

Planning what to grow, and when, is a fine art, said gardener Catherine Lowe.

“There are all sorts of things that are out of control,” she said of springtime cold snaps or unseasonably heavy rainfall.

“We have to be careful not to plant too early – so you try to plant the seeds not all in one go.”