Hellen's Garden Festival 2018

We had such a great day today. 

It's been a long hard week with my work having to take priority and wife having to deal with an Ofstead inspection at her school. So it was great to be able to spend the day together as a family at Hellen's garden festival again this year.

We look forward to it each year and it never disappoints!

This year instead of doing a talk I did a small workshop with a talk! It was on unusual veg and I was pleased to have a good sized audience as well as plenty of friends in there!

I started by having 8 or 9 veg plants and lots of labels that people had to decide which plant was which. Really hard at this time of year as many of the tubers haven't formed so people had to guess from the leaves - it would be no fun if they got them right anyway, seemed a great way to engage people and get them talking about the veg.

I then talked about those vegetables for a bit before getting everyone to take some cuttings, plant up some New Zealand yams, sow some electric daisy seeds and prick out some Korean mint. I got some really positive feedback afterwards so I was feeling really pleased.

We then got to enjoy the rest of the festival. It was such a lovely day and really good fun as we had lots of friends and family there. The kids always love it, they were so excited when we turned up as they could remember previous years.

It always surprises how much there is for children to do here and that so much of it is free! I had great fun helping to make a pottery fish and my eldest loved doing some screen printing whilst the other two made dragon flies. 

PILE ON!!!!!

Printing on fabric

Another great day at Hellen's Garden Festival, we're already looking forward to next year!