Woodford Festival just opened for the 30th year!! I feel so lucky to have this international festival just 25 minutes down the road. Every year we aim to be there to immerse ourselves and family in an amazing wealth of creative talent and be inspired.
This year, Evan and I will be leading 3 workshops in the Children’s Festival as part of our community work through the Ethos Foundation. Come and say g’day if you are planning to be there. We are billed as Ethos Kids. This is the blurb from the festival brochure:
ETHOS KIDS
Morag and Evan are passionate permaculture people. Their focus is local food, ecovillages, community gardens and greening education, having taught permaculture in 20 countries.
- SUN 27 DEC Big Ideas 3:30PM – Making a mini-wicking garden
- TUE 29 DEC Far Out 2:30PM – Eco-cubby building
- THUR 31 DEC Edge 1:20PM – Arty Seeds
This is the program description for our Mini Wicking Bed session tomorrow:
We spent the day preparing resources for our workshops and dropping them off at the site. We use local natural and recycled materials.
We gathered bamboo for the cubbies from a friends garden at Crystal Waters, and I washed and prepared milk containers for the mini-wicking gardens. I’ve been collecting them from the community over the past few months. Tomorrow before I go I’ll harvest and take in fresh herbs and perennial cuttings for the children to plant.
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| Evan carrying in the little bamboos for the children to decorate their cubbies. |
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| Hugh was a great helper bringing in some of the bamboo for the eco-cubby workshop. The giant turtle water mister will be a very popular spot in the heat tomorrow. |
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| Our stash of materials tucked away for use in Ethos Kids sessions over the next few days. |
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| The children were super excited to be at the festival site – the amazing spaces that have been created, and the musical vibe that is starting to hum, the gathering of new friends to be met and played with. |
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| I love how the festival food stalls offer such great food – so many organic, fair trade, raw and healthy food options. The kids look forward to the summer fruit slushies – a welcome cool treat on hot festival days – in biodegradable cups with biodegradable straws. |
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| The paints and crafts are waiting for the kids – Monty wanted so much to delve in today. |
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| Brightly coloured hand made decorations are everywhere. The whole festival site looks amazing. |
Enjoyed reading your blog, you have a wonderful family and a great life philosophy, one which I hope to one day have as well.
Guida
Oh I am out of the loop! I thought the Woodford Folk Festival was just a music festival!! Too late for this year but I will try and get there next year! Have a great time doing your thing.
The children's festival within the festival site is amazing. It has it's own complete program for the entire duration and just a great place to retreat with a young family – massive sandpit, cool mist sprayers, cubby houses, and last year Maia was the under 10 Woodford Chess Champion. The Greenhouse in the main festival has such fabulous speakers too. Definitely worth coming even if just for a day. The variety of music, circus, dance, culture is astounding.
The festival sounds wonderful. I share Fiona Chain's comment, I thought it was a music festival, didn't realise there was so many other wonderful things happening.
With all this heat and humidity, just the other day my son was imagining how wonderful it would be if the pond below our house iced over and we could go skating!
I hopped over from "down to earth" as she said how wonderful your blog is coming along. I must agree. I love reading about your lifestyle and am always open to learning something new! I am in the United States on the west coast where it's currently about 32 and freezing cold. The weather there looks so lovely right about now. Slightly jealous 🙂
-Beth