FORGET sweet Williams and carnations – for this year's Oxford in Bloom contest, gardeners will be judged on their sweetcorn and courgettes.

Free seeds for the garden veg will be dished out to entire streets along with the grow bags to plant them in.

Elsewhere neighbours in Barns Place, Blackbird Leys, have won £1,000 to create a bee-friendly rooftop garden and volunteers will be planting flowering bulbs at St Sepulchre's Cemetery in Jericho and Cutteslowe Park.

This is the new-look Oxford in Bloom.

Where in previous years Oxford City Council invited the same proud gardeners to enter their efforts year after year, this year the authority has flipped the contest on its head.

Organisers invited neighbourhoods to apply for a share of a £4,000 pot for community projects that would help drab and grey areas of the city to blossom.

Now it has announced the eight projects which will get a share of the cash.

One of them, unsurprisingly, is the city's very own guerilla gardening group Incredible Edible Oxford.

They are the ones who will be dishing out grow bags and courgette seeds in Rose Hill, Littlemore and Cutteslowe.

Group founder Rachel Hammond said she envisioned the project bringing anonymous neighbours together, nattering over the garden fence about how their gardens were growing.

She said: "We call them the three sisters: the runner beans grow up the sweetcorn and the courgettes grow across the ground.

"We want to show people it's not that hard to grow your own food and there's a health benefit: fresh veg have fewer calories than processed foods and there's also a mental health benefit – just having your hands in soil has been proven to be therapeutic."

The Incredible Edible project was inspired by a similar one run by a sister group in Swindon.

Ms Hammond said: "They said it was their best project by far in terms of impact because it got everyone growing their own food and taking to each other."

Incredible Edible Oxford will now work with the city council identify streets in each of their three chosen neighbourhoods which could most benefit from the growing gambit.

Other projects set to receive money include improvements to communal gardens at Vicarage Court sheltered housing scheme in South Oxford, the development of a nature garden at Blackbird Leys Adventure Playground, some guerilla gardening in Meadow Lane, Iffley, and support for hanging baskets along London Road, Headington.

In return for their funding, each group has agreed to enter their finished projects into this year's Thames and Chiltern In Bloom competition run by the local RHS branch.

Judging will be undertaken by RHS judges in July and results will be announced at the Thames and Chiltern awards ceremony in September.