Locals needed to share garden secrets at festival

If you’re growing an abundant edible garden, the organisers of Margaret River’s not-for-profit Edible Gardens Festival want to hear from you.

The annual sustainability and food growing festival is returning on May 11-12, and organisers Trevor Paddenburg and Valerie Vallee are on the lookout for new and inspiring productive gardens to feature on the program.

“We’re super excited to build on last year’s sell-out event and bring the Edible Gardens Festival back in 2024,” Mr Paddenburg said.

“We’ll have a curated program of new, inspiring and varied edible gardens that are open to the community, with the gardeners on-hand to share their wealth of knowledge, tips, experience and inspiration.

“If you want to get involved, open your productive garden to the community, and help inspire other people to grow their own food, we’d love to hear from you.

“We’re looking for passionate gardeners willing to open their space and share their knowledge, tricks and tips to help others achieve abundance in their gardens.”

Mr Paddenburg said festival organisers were keen to speak to people with a range of different garden spaces.

“We’re hunting for a diverse range of gardens including residential, rural or larger scale, so if you’ve got a passion for crafting compost, growing seriously amazing stone fruit, harvesting bucketloads of varied vegetables, or foraging in your backyard food forest, we’d love to hear from you.”

Witchcliffe permaculture gardener Gillian Pearce opened her garden for last year’s festival and said it was an amazing experience.

“Opening our garden was such an exciting, satisfying and fulfilling experience,” she said. “Having the chance to hear people’s thoughts on our property and talk to them about their hopes and plans for their own gardens was invaluable.”

Ms Vallee said the Festival was aimed at connecting community and empowering people with knowledge and inspiration to get their hands dirty, grow their own food and have fun in the process.

“This year we really want to delve deeper into the links between food growing and sustainability,” she said.

“The health of our edible gardens is connected to the health of our local environment, so with this in mind we’re keen to include edible gardens that demonstrate connection to country, cultivation of bush foods and medicine, or the use of indigenous species to enhance productivity of edibles.

“Last year, tickets sold out and we had to turn a lot of people away, so this time we’ve introduced a separate Saturday and Sunday day ticket for just $15 each to give more people a chance to take part on one or both days.”

Ms Vallee said gardens would be open from 9am-1pm each day of the festival, followed by practical workshops, ticketed separately at $25 each with a maximum of 15 students per class.

“The feedback was that people wanted to take their learning to a deeper level, so we’ve introduced a choice of four 90-minute workshops held Saturday afternoon and repeated on Sunday,” she said.

Topics include mastering composting, wicking beds and other waterwise tips, advanced soil management, and garden tool maintenance – all held on-site at Fair Harvest Permaculture, which is also the official campground for the event and will be serving food and drinks at the café across the weekend.

Tickets go on sale next month at ediblegardensfestival.au.

To nominate your garden, email trevorpaddenburg@hotmail.com with your contact details and a short description.

Volunteers will assist on the day and you will need to open your garden to the public for four hours on one day of the weekend, and conduct a short garden talk each hour.

The Edible Gardens Festival is supported by the AMR Shire, Margaret River Community Pantry and Margaret River Regional Environment Centre.