Cathrins Adventure #1 GROW fest
Hello everybody,
I am Cathrin the new intern at GIY after Elaine. I am from Germany and very happy to get the chance to work for GIY and come to Ireland.
I study Agricultural Management and Marketing back in Germany. During the week I live a funny and crazy student life near Munich and on the weekend I return to my safe harbour: my parents’ home. My family runs an arable farm. In our own garden we grow different kind of vegs (tomato, salads, cucumbers, courgettes, pumpkin, potatoes..) I had the chance to work on some self-sufficient farms in Germany and Australia. I am passionate about spreading the GIY message and learning more about a self-sufficient way of living.
I joined GIY the week before GROW fest, which was a really nice start and allowed me to do some really lovely decoration work in my first few days. So while the rest of the team was busy typing in their laptops and making telephone calls I was the Queen of the glue gun and gold spray. I spread jam jars everywhere in the office so it was real challenge to make your way through the office. One of the outcomes was our trophy for the winner of the final spudoff: our golden Mr. Potato. Which was Shona’s great idea. Even though everybody had a lot of work and pressure before GROW fest they were all really welcoming and never lost their sense of humour. What a pity that my English is not good enough to understand all the jokes.
Once Mr Potato was placed on his wooden throne, which was made by the lovely Eimear, we were “ready for take off” and GROW fest could start. We had some really good talks among other things Joanna Blythman who was talking about the food industry’s darkest secrets, Susan Turner, Mark Diacono, Lia Leendertz. They all provided our GIYers and other visitors with ideas for their garden. One of our core events was the panel discussion about hospital food which was a great success and led to talk on national media about hospital food. It was a pleasure to meet a lot of lovely GIYers and Elaine who flew in from England for GROW fest.
Apart from the talks in our GROW tent there were lot of other things going on: demonstrations, we had a market with fresh products from our GIY Market Garden, GIY “fan equipment” like Michael’s GROW COOK EAT book, seeds, cups etc. Another highlight was our cooking demonstration which took place in Blackfriars, a mystic old building where a marquee with a demo kitchen was set up.
Our market feast took part on Saturday evening, we had lots of tasty vegetables from our GIY garden combined with other local products to make a gorgeous dinner. Definitely one of the best meals I have ever had in my life. I could really taste the great effort which was involved in that dinner. This lovely dinner and especially the cucumber beer provided us with power for the GROW fest Sunday. So this was my first adventure at GIY and I really enjoyed it. Looking forward to my next adventures.
