Event Coverage: ACT Permaculture Festival – 40 Years!

The ACT Permaculture Festival has celebrated its 40-year anniversary at Canberra City Farm in Fyshwick.

Despite the cruel wind and the slight drops of rain throughout the day, it did not put a damper on fellow Permaculture festivalgoers from attending the events special day.

The main idea of the festival is to provide people with food, energy, shelter and other needs in a viable way. On the day, an array of different stores and activities helped those understand how to live a low-impact lifestyle and grow your own food to lower energy use.

The event displayed a vast range from food, drink, clothes, landscape design, heating and cooling effects, education pathways and empowering local food resilience.

It’s was a relaxed family-friendly environment that inspired those present to make positive changes in their life and how easy it is to apply basic living principles.

While people scattered around between the different stores, there was a large group of people surrounding a little tree.

At that tree was ABC’s gardening personality Costa Georgiadis. He was discussing different techniques people can use when growing different vegetables and trees.

Local Canberran Vera was amongst the group and she discussed how she is a fan of Costa’s work and that she uses his techniques in her own backyard.

“I watch him every Saturday on Gardening Australia and from the show I have learnt that putting out shrubs for my chickens to eat has worked really well, I am also very happy to have got a photo with him”.

As a part of the festival’s milestone, Costa later delivered a great talk about his journey to working in media and how the main theme of his talk ‘Let’s Connect’ landed him in the position he is in now.

Once Costa finished on stage, he explained how university students can go about being more self-sufficient;

“Uni students can connect with growing some of their own food. Starting off with growing simple salad greens is important and with that you can make green smoothies,” He said.

“Get connected with a local box system where you buy veggies regularly rather than impulse buying at the supermarket. You can buy it from fresh organic suppliers that deliver you a box each week for $35 bucks to the house and you can split that across 4-5 people.”

He also talked about how students can buy other products as well as take courses to learn more about achieving basic needs.

“Visiting your local op shops for furniture, for clothes and cooking items is good and another thing you can do is a simple course, a lot of councils do them for free as well as fomenting, so making your own jars of tomato sauce, which can last you nine months.”

Overall, gaining insight from a man that offers such an enticing outlook on how the world can be a better place was very rewarding. He also mentioned how gardening can become an educational hub for local Canberrans.