Bee-friendly and win tickets to Bloom!

With bees in trouble worldwide, bee-friendly gardening can play a vital role in supporting these essential pollinators.

That’s why Friends of the Earth plans to create a nature garden at Ireland’s largest family, food and gardening festival, Bloom in the Park from June 1-5, but we need your help to make it happen!

We’ve partnered with 2016 RTE SuperGarden finalist and permaculture expert, Suzie Cahn, to propose a nature-friendly ‘postcard garden’ at Bloom called The Bright Side of Life. Our nature education garden would showcase how you provide food, shelter and nesting places for important pollinators like bees and other insects.

Bloom’s organizers love our idea and have selected it for exhibition in the show gardens area where it could be seen by over 150,000 visitors over the five-day festival.

Now we need to raise €3,500 to build it. And we only have a week to raise it if we are going to have the garden ready in time.

Help build our bee-friendly garden
Everyone who makes a donation will be entered into a raffle for a pair of tickets to Bloom.

Our ‘Bright side of life’ garden includes plants that attract beneficial bugs and our clear planter boxes will allow visitors to see the soil elements and worm tunnels so necessary for soil fertility. Our pond life tank will also showcase the importance of water in providing habitat for froglets and insects in their first stages of life.

Help us bring the ‘Bright Side of Life’ to Bloom.

The entire premise of our Friends of the Earth garden is, not surprisingly, Earth-Friendly. The structures are made from recycled materials and the plantings will be chemical free to provide food and habitat for beneficial insects and worms. In addition, we’re one of the few gardens at Bloom that will be using peat-free compost and raising awareness about issue of peat to home gardeners.

Friends of the Earth volunteers will be on hand to provide top tips on how to put home gardens on the ‘bright side of life’ and educate visitors about initiatives such as People4Soil and the National Pollinator Plan.

We are (literally) building our work on food and nature from the ground up. Re-connecting with nature and protecting pollinators is essential to a sustainable future. And Bloom is an ideal place to build support for that message. But first, we need your to help make our garden a reality .

Other show gardens rely on major commercial sponsors. We depend on you, friends of the Earth, to make our fun garden with its positive message possible.

Together, we can bring The Bright Side of Life to Bloom.

Thank you for giving what you can.

Cara Augustenborg
Chairperson
Friends of the Earth

P.S. If you make a donation you will be entered into a raffle to win a pair of tickets to Bloom.

Please do share this with anyone you know who would like to support The Bright Side of Life garden.

 

Check out some of our work so far on nature protection:

• Our Chairperson, Dr. Cara Augustenborg talked to Trinity Professor Jane Stout at Bloom 2016 about the National Pollinator Plan and chemical free gardening in this video .
• Cara write this opinion piece for the Irish Examiner on Glyphosate (found in RoundUp) and why we need to stop using it.
• And Ireland’s National Pollinator Plan and Junior Pollinator Plan for kids in association with the National Biodiversity Data Centre, which we endorsed last year.
• People4Soil petition for a European Soil Directive, which needs your signature to make it a reality.
• And of course we were part of the successful campaign to reverse the decision to abolish the Department of Environment a year ago. Below the 13,000 strong petition being handed in.