Community Food Garden Management

Come join us in Slí Eile, one of the 2022 Bord Bia National Organic Awards winners, on the 28th of February, to learn how biodiversity can be incorporated into and supported by local food production.

Managing a garden requires a full-year work plan, with different tasks being required throughout the seasons. Another consideration is how to manage our gardens with biodiversity in mind. Biodiversity is key to achieving any healthy habitat or garden, supporting a diversity of wildlife and connecting us to the world around us.

Slí Eile, a social farm based in Churchtown, is a local example of how to harness organic farming, and how by encouraging biodiversity we can support garden outputs. This workshop will encourage a hands-on investigation of how this social enterprise became one of the winners at the 2022 Bord Bia National Organic Awards and will look at how their actions support local biodiversity.

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What's involved?

The workshop will begin with a discussion with the Slí Eile staff around the importance of biodiversity and how they can support gardens, highlighting key steps to making your vegetable patches more biodiverse highlighting key elements such as:

• Managing the layout; how this can impact drainage, pest control and disease management.
• Choosing your Species; what wildlife and species can you attract to your garden?
• Organic solutions; how to implement biological controls and clever planning using organic farming methods.

For the second half of the workshop we will take a tour around the Slí Eile farm and will look at the measures they have implemented to support biodiversity within their gardens.