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Success at Floriade! (Canberra, Australia)

Penny Kothe December 3, 2013

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Beautiful innovation at Floriade 2013 — Urban Agriculture Australia helps Canberra celebrate the annual festival of flowers.

Spring took on a whole new meaning at this year’s Floriade ("Australia’s Biggest Celebration of Spring"), with an innovative, interactive and inspiring edible garden display by Urban Agriculture Australia (UAA).

Over 14 organisations formed the collaborative venture known as UAA, which delivered its first food garden display and education kit, demonstrating new organic gardening technologies that create high yielding crops in urban backyards and on apartment balconies.

Volunteers from many of the organisations turned up in force, with 95 volunteers contributing their time and talents to build, equip, furnish and explain the UAA display. This is the first time that such a display has been mounted at Floriade, and it was a testing time for all concerned: Floriade management had accepted UAA’s proposal to provide a display and UAA, with limited or no experience in this kind of thing, had to deliver the goods!

It succeeded, and succeeded splendidly. Feedback suggested the public really liked the fact that a lot of the display items were hand-made — wicking beds, milk-bottle vertical gardens, a rocket stove and scarecrow. The DIY aspect had great appeal and illustrated that you don’t need to resort to ready-made big-store items for a garden to look and function well.

Not only did this project deliver for Floriade, the community engagement and educational aspect was beneficial for volunteers. One of the main roles for volunteers, so as to make the display attractive, was to help sprout the dozens of vegetable and herb plants, and do so in the dead of winter. With the use of polytunnels in people’s backyards, an abundance of edible plants were grown. Volunteers also helped build and dismantle the display, deliver a range of scheduled semi-formal talks, held either at or nearby the display, and were ‘Explainers’ of the display for visitors during the month of Floriade. Many volunteers commented that "the best way to learn is to teach" and having to explain things to an audience promotes one’s own learning. In fact, some visitors knew as much or more than the UAA explainers!

No one could predict that the display would prove to be anywhere near as popular a drawcard as it was. Some visitors said that they’d come to Floriade precisely for the kind of information that the UAA display provided.

Although Floriade is all about flowers, at the official launch of the month-long festival even celebrities like Costa Georgiadis from ‘Gardening Australia’ and masterchef Julie Goodwin talked about food, not flowers. Costa said that the farmer should be at the top of the health system. Food is basic and fundamental — get the food right and so much follows.

So what about next year? Already UAA is talking about a bigger display area that would not get so crowded and what different technologies could be included in the display. As one volunteer said: "We have learnt!" — the many visitors to the UAA display at Floriade 2013 undoubtedly feel the same way.

Thank you to Canberra Organic Growers Society (COGS) for contributions to this article.

Find out more at www.uaa.org.au.

One of the volunteer construction teams