Gardening for the Future Workshops

I’m pleased to share news of a new series of monthly planet friendly gardening workshops that will take us through to December 2023. Put together in collaboration with Clare Breen at Visual Carlow, over the coming months we will explore how we can help to combat climate change in our gardens and growing spaces.

The nine-part gardening workshop series funded by Carlow County Council and the Arts Council are part of David Beattie’s project Future Light from Distant Stars, a working greenhouse, workshop space and light installation.

The gardening workshops will take place on weekends, evenings and weekdays at different times, to provide everyone with an opportunity to attend at least one. All are free apart from the Container Planting for Pollinators workshop in May as participants will be creating their planter and taking it home.

A series of workshops exploring how we can help to combat climate change in our gardens and growing spaces

Over the next nine months we will be looking at wildflowers and mowing techniques, creating nesting sites for bees, looking at garden pests and how to ditch the chemicals, conserving water and irrigation techniques, seed saving and sovereignty, composting and soil organism, tree planting and food waste.

Guests include wildflower guru Molly Aylesbury of Bare Necessities, representatives from Carlow Beekeepers, Ann Phelan, Community Water Officer from Lawpro, Jo Newton, Seed Curator at Irish Seedsavers, author of A Seed Saving Handbook and member of The Gaia Foundation, and Dave Beecher, a member of the Danú Farming Group which has been awarded funding through the European Innovation Partnership programme and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine in Ireland to carry out a 5-year Biological Farming Transition Programme.

For more information and to book tickets, please head over to the Visual website online booking system here.

You can hear more about the programme during my chat with Sue Nunn on KCLR Radio on the 23rd March below:

The collapse of global biodiversity is a very real and urgent matter and evidences why we need to thinking more sustainably in our gardens. For more information with statistics and links, read this recent article here.  Hope to see you at some of the workshops.