2012 Dublin Harvest Festival

Venue: Wolfe Tone Park, Jervis St. Dublin 1

Date: Saturday 29th September 2012, from 11am until 5pm.

2012 Dublin Harvest Festival Poster

The event is organised by Dublin Community Growers, a voluntary non-profit organisation which was set up to support existing community gardens and promote the development of new ones. The core ethos of Dublin Community Growers is represented by social inclusion and environmental responsibility.

During the event organically grown produce from Dublin’s Community Gardens will be shared for free with any individuals who want to join in the fun by pledging to help out with their local community garden. This could be with specific projects, or with the general maintenance and gardening that such projects always require. In return for helping with watering, weeding, and other activities, participants will be able to acquire the horticultural and administrative skills that community garden project volunteers need in order to maintain these garden projects.

Dublin’s first free Public Harvest Festival will also feature many Workshops, Presentations, Information Stalls, Live Music, Film Screenings, as well as a Seed Swap. Amongst other activities, school children will be able to get involved in “Seed Bomb” Workshops. Children and adults can make their own apple juice from apples that have been collected from trees all over the city.

The Green Home Programme, funded by the EPA, along with Healthy Food for All, is one of the partner organisations supporting the Dublin Harvest Festival. They will be delivering presentations on their Green Home Programme which supports households in reducing their bills also also reducing their environmental impact. A representative from An Taisce’s Green-Schools programme will be on hand to provide information and guidance to those looking to bring a positive environmental message back to their school community.

The vegetables, herbs, and fruit grown in Dublin’s thirty Community Gardens will be given away at this festival to city residents in exchange for pledges to help out with their local community garden.

Dublin City’s first free public Harvest Festival will also feature workshops on beekeeping, composting, foraging and water conservation.

There will be talks on how to set up a community garden, horticulture, and the notion of food sovereignty whereby people are put in touch with local food producers in an attempt to support locally grown food.

Fun events will include live music, film clips and a seed swap whereby visitors to the festival can exchange surplus garden seeds for new varieties. Arts and crafts stalls will showcase Dublin’s artisan skills.

Seed Bomb workshops will allow children and adults to get their hands dirty mixing clay and peat with seeds and making bombs to take away to ‘green’ waste grounds in their area.

Schedule of Events – Community Forum Marquee.

Schedule of Events – Events Marquee.

Stall Holders Tent

As part of the very first Dublin Harvest Festival we will be showing a film in The Lighthouse Cinema in Smithfield on Thursday 27th September at 8.30 pm.

The main film is an award winning 2008 documentary called “The Garden” about a 14 acre community garden in Los Angeles, this will be preceded by a short 12 minute version of “The Hidden Garden” by Garvan Gallagher which tells the story of a community garden in North Inner City Dublin.

The Hidden Garden

“It’s like going to mass” is how one resident describes her time in The Hidden Garden. In 2009, the locals of a small residential street in Dublin’s north inner city decided to give purpose to an empty patch of land that was left overgrown, debris-filled and purposeless since the 1980’s. The Hidden Garden documents the transformation of this dumping ground into a vibrant, energetic and award winning community garden. This project and this film in particular is about the human story behind a simple idea, a story that documents the slow emergence of far more than vegetables, but a reawakening of a community.

Film: The Garden

The Garden is a 2008 American documentary film directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy. This 88 minute documentary tells the story of the now demolished South Central Farm; a community garden and urban farm located in Los Angeles, California.

The 14 acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles was the largest of its kind in the United States. Formed after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers created a miracle in one of the country’s most blighted neighborhoods. The Garden follows the plight of the farmers, from the tilled soil of this urban farm to the polished marble of City Hall. Mostly immigrants from Latin America, from countries where they feared for their lives if they were to speak out, we watch them organize, fight back, and demand answers:

Why was the land sold to a wealthy developer for millions less than fair-market value? Why was the transaction done in a closed-door session of the LA City Council? Why has it never been made public?

The Garden has the pulse of verité with the narrative pull of fiction, telling the story of the country’s largest urban farm, backroom deals, land developers, green politics, money, poverty, power, and racial discord. The film explores and exposes the fault lines in American society and raises crucial and challenging questions about liberty, equality, and justice for the poorest and most vulnerable among us.