Ballymaloe Garden Festival
Marking Ballymaloe's 50th Anniversary
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| Welcome! |
Naturally enough, there will be quite a focus on food when the second annual Ballymaloe Garden Festival is held on 30th and 31st of August. Klaus Laitenberger will show you how to grow organic vegetables, Debbie Shaw will tell you all about raw food while Michael Kelly will present his guide to growing your own food.
If you feel hungry after all that gardening, you’ll have choices. The Big Shed will be in use again and there will be food served by local market heroes. And that’s not all. Tom and Johann Doorley will be on hand on Sunday to show you “how to eat your garden”. They believe that good food should be enjoyed by everybody and that cooking is therefore a vital life skill.
The Festival, to be held in the grounds at Ballymaloe House, promises to be a wonderful weekend full of garden workshops, walks, and talks, says Aoife McCann. “We will have specialist nursery stalls filled with seeds, rare and old fashioned trees, shrubs, climbers, perennials, fruit, culinary and medicinal herbs and garden equipment all manned by experts.”
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| FORM Sculpture trail |
“It will be all about sustainable garden design, layered pruning, saving seeds and our traditional native heritage, demonstrating different methods of propagation, growing interesting and unusual food, forgotten skills of bygone times, foraging for cuttings and flowers for fabulous floral arrangements, growing your own vegetables from seeds, growing a market garden business, a photography workshop, cookery demonstration, first aid from your garden, native Irish bees and so much more.”
“We will be joined this year by Gary Graham, Brian Cross, Caroline Holmes, Fiann Ó Nualláin, Michael Kelly, Debbie Shaw, Tom and Johann Doorley, Thady Barrett and many others ……The timetable of events is available here.”
This year sees Ballymaloe celebrate its 50th year and to mark this Susan Turner has designed a new garden for the Festival, set within the walled garden. Susan will give the opening talk of the festival introducing the 50th Year Anniversary Garden and her design.
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Richie Scott of Artistic Alliance, together with some of the exhibiting artists, will give tours of FORM, an outdoor sculpture exhibition on the grounds of Ballymaloe House.
“The Big Shed will be back with a children’s area, plant, craft and gardening tools stalls. Lots of free talks given by our garden experts. There will be food served by our local market heroes. A delicious time to be had while learning about saving seeds, our edible landscape, first aid from the garden, conservatory plants and garden equipment demonstrations.”
Cost of entry to the festival is €5 per adult, with children under 16 free. Entrance tickets available on the day.
The garden lectures and workshops held in the Grainstore/Walled Garden will be priced individually, tickets will be available on the day and on website .
