Petty's Apple Festival & Tenderbreak Tours

Like hundreds of others, we attended the annual apple festival at Petty’s Orchard in Templestowe on March 31st. There was a wide variety of stalls, displays and activities for people to view. Some of the highlights were tours of the heritage orchard with hundreds of varieties of apples, very informative talks by Freddie the “Snake Man”, talks about heritage apples and the yummy tasting tent where you can “taste test” a whole range of apples. This enables you to choose varieties to plant that you know you like. There was plenty of healthy organic food available for lunch- our favourite was Janet’s large plate of delicious organic pasta with pesto.

There were several displays by permaculture groups and stalls selling plants. We couldn’t resist buying a cool climate banana plant for our sister-in-law who uses the bananas and leaves in her Thai cooking. Snake Gully Cider had demonstrations of cider making and for those with a sweet tooth, John the ice cream man sold delicious organic ice creams. The photo above shows our stall (the one with the yellow and red flags). Thankyou to Belinda ( http://belindas-simple-life.blogspot.com/ ) for providing this photo and the one at left of the "Tasting tent".

As we have done for the past few years we had a stall selling some of our veggies and our friend’s bird & rat proof chook feeder (We’ll do a post on this great product soon). Our daughter, Sally (Mustang Sal’s Nature Photography) had a great display of some of her framed photos and the photo cards that she creates.

It was a very successful day with Sally selling quite a few cards and we sold most of the veggies. We also had a chance to speak with dozens of lovely people, many of whom had already been on one of the tours we run at Tenderbreak Permaculture Farm. This is the main reason we go to festivals and markets like this. We love chatting with people about the social, environmental and economic issues that have arisen over the past few decades and discussing what we can do to resolve these. We share what we have learned on our journey towards a more sustainable life, and love hearing about other people’s experiences.

The markets also provide an opportunity to promote our “Permaculture In Action” tours. Our April 5th tour was booked out with 15 people attending. Although we advertise the tours as going from 1:30 to 4:00pm there was so much to see and talk about, we finished up around 5pm. Our May 17th tour is close to being booked out, so we have decided to add additional tours on MAY 3rd and MAY 24th. If you would like to attend one of these tours contact us and we will book you in and send you a map showing how to get here. If these dates are unsuitable send us your email address and we’ll put you on our mailing list and keep you informed about future tour dates. If you would like more information about the tours we can send you a pamphlet with all the details.

Congratulations to Pete the Permie and the other organisers for a wonderfully interesting and informative day at Petty’s. We are looking forward to next year’s festival on the last Sunday in March- make sure you put it in your calendar now.