TURF’S UP!
Rip out your artificial lawns! Break up your tarmac!
The turf is up!
TURF’S UP! is a quarterly gardening magazine that explores how we can be better gardeners by better understanding the social, historical, cultural, and political contexts in which we grow. The garden is not a detached space: it is intertwined with nature and landscape and place-making and folklore and myth and the decisions of a thousand people before you and a thousand people after.
TURF’S UP! is interested in interesting plants, people, and places. We are local, joyful, and are curious about how gardens and gardening are entangled with every other aspects of our lives.
TURF’S UP! is a print-only magazine. Be there or be boring!
SUBMISSIONS FOR ISSUE 1: HARVEST FESTIVAL ARE NOW OPEN
We’re looking for articles, interviews, photographs, artwork, short stories and more. Submissions are open until 20 July 2026. See our FAQs below for more information.
Submission FAQs
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For our first issue, the theme is ‘HARVEST FESTIVAL’. Take it and run: what are you harvesting? What are the local quirks of the harvest festival in your village? What do you do with your glut of courgettes? Why is the allotment trade economy the backbone of a climate-emergency world?
I don’t know, you tell me!
We’re thinking: food - seed-saving - farming - cooking - preserving - gluttony - sharing - jam-making - crops - crop circles - traditions - festivals - community - machinery - harvest moons. This list is non-exhaustive. Please surprise me!
I however have a soft spot for the Neolithic period, chalk landscapes, and interviews with interesting people.
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Essays! Interviews! Short stories! Think-pieces! No-think pieces! Jokes! Crosswords! Letters! Puzzles! Short stories! Paintings! Illustrations! Photographs! Form is just a concept to be played with!
Please do not send me how-to-grow guides. There are lots of very serious and very worthy gardening magazines that will tell you what to plant and where to plant it. I am neither serious nor worthy. If you would like to learn these things, I strongly recommend buying GARDENER’S WORLD or AMATEUR GARDENING instead.
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For all non-fiction articles, please send a proposal of a few sentences to turfsupmag@gmail.com. If your article is somehow already written and would make a miraculous fit, please email it to me in full anyway.
For short stories, photos, and artwork, please email turfsupmag@gmail.com with the piece you would like to submit.
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All contributors receive a free copy of TURF’S UP!
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Please get in touch by 20 July 2026 with your proposal or submission. We will get back to all contributors within two weeks of this date.
