Ecovillage attracts Edible Gardens Festival crowds

The weather gods smiled on the Edible Gardens Festival organisers this year as more than 500 punters came out in force to visit a diverse array of gardens across the Margaret River region.

Read the organisers’ wrap-up here: https://ediblegardensfestival.au/edible-gardens-festival-2023-a-huge-success/

There is so much edible garden goodness going on at the Witchcliffe Ecovillage that Saturday afternoon on the event program was dedicated wholly to our burgeoning village. It was a great format for visitors who could park up and spend the whole afternoon at the Ecovillage wandering through our shared cluster community gardens at leisure and checking out a whole range of edible gardens within our residents’ Exclusive Use Area (EUA) vegie patches.

I was there with my family planting a green manure crop in my own EUA and enjoyed watching groups of visitors marvelling at our impressive community garden infrastructure and beautiful sustainable homes as they wandered the pathway network from cluster to cluster.

The Edible Gardens Festival was a fabulous opportunity for WEV to demonstrate our food growing culture, especially as Ecovillage Horticulture Manager and all-round garden guru, Mark Tupman, was on the agenda. He attracted quite the crowd for his talk on soil biodiversity in the demonstration garden he has established on one of our agricultural lots.

Given the sell-out crowd and the wonderful feedback for this event, it’s clear that next year will be better than ever, and we will have a plethora of flourishing, abundant gardens on display.