Cool Earth at the Festival of World Cultures

Feelgood Organic Hampers has been asked to participate in this year's Cool Earth exhibition at the Dun Laoghaire Festival of World Cultures.

Run by Dun Laoghaire Rathdown CoCo's Environmental and Culture Department, the event takes place this Saturday and Sunday the 29th and 30th of August on the concourse of Dun Laoghaire County Hall between 11am and 6pm. It is the third year that it has been run and it aims to illustrate 'simple ways to reduce your carbon footprint'.

Speakers include Trevor Sargent , Evelyn Cusack from MET Eirann and Kieran O'Brien from UNICEF Ireland. There is also entertainment including music from environmental folk singer Enda Reilly, a mixture of Japanese and traditional Irish music from Philip Horan and Junshi Murakam and comedy from the hyper eco-aware MOMO Theatre company.

There will also be plenty of family friendly activities including making bird feeders and plant pots.

We will be there with a selection of the best Irish produced Organic Food, the Irish made skincare range from Flourish Organics a selection of organic cotton baby clothing and of course hampers. Other stall holders include the Amnesty Freedom cafe, Coolfin Gardens Organic Bakery, Glenisk, The Native Woodland Trust.

For more information check out the Cool Earth website.

The allotment phenomenon

The cult of grow your own has become massive this year. Maybe it's the credit crunch driving us back to a simpler way of life, a hobby that saves us money not one that eats through our finances. Maybe it's the inevitable next step in the green revolution. Or maybe all those hours of watching Hugh do it on River Cottage have finally paid off. Almost everyone I know is growing something this year and it's a great community to be part of. A mild panic I had during the week about my potatoes was soon assuaged by talking to a fellow gardener.

I guess part of the reason I moved to the country was to be able to grow my own and become more sustainable, which is why I often feel a bit sorry for those who live in apartments or the city. There is a lot that can be done with window boxes and planters but if you want to be more adventurous, don't have a garden and really want to get your hands, boots and clothes dirty, an allotment could be the way to go.

Originally hailing from England my view of allotments has always been of old men with flat caps accompanied by whippets putting their feet up in a ramshackle shed. A view which was probably influenced by popular culture, allotments were spaces which soap opera characters like Arthur Fowler and Jack Duckworth inhabited. Coming from the suburbs allotments weren't something that I had first hand experience of, everyone in the 'burbs has their own garden!

I went to college in the north of England, just outside Newcastle and the allotment was far more prevalent there. I went to a photographic exhibition on the subject, the black and white prints of people enjoying the allotment life, growing food, pigeon fancying, being part of a community was enough to sell the whole concept to me.

It is this romantic view of allotments which has stuck with me, and when I learned of community allotment schemes beginning to spring up across Ireland I was delighted.

Earlier this year I bumped into a business contact of mine, Mary from Taxing Times, she told me that she was involved in the Harbour View Community Garden Project. The community received a grant of €2,500 to convert a 3 acre plot of vacant land into allotments. A lot of work had to be done to clear and prepare the ground, a task which the community took on together. Well wishers donated equipment and even trees.

The allotments are now being rented, the proceeds of which will go back into the garden with the intention of establishing a native woodland and orchard.

This is just one of many stories of thriving communities across Ireland pulling together to create gardening space. To keep up to date with news on allotments near you check out Allotments Ireland, you can also follow them on Twitter.

Back in the UK it seems politicians across the spectrum are encouraging the grow your own movement. Boris Johnson and Gordon Brown have both been in the news due to their green fingers. Mr Brown has even taken a leaf out of President Obama's book and declared that he and his wife are to grow veg in the garden at No. 10. So the allotment phenomenon seems to be here to stay.

*please excuse the quality of the images which were grabbed from a scanned document

Water Labeling

Last week the Food Ethics Council (FEC) and Sustain launched a joint report into the amount of water used to produce the food we eat. They proposed the introduction of a water footprint label which they hope would encourage good water stewardship practices and help to educate the consumer on how much 'virtual water' goes into what we consume.

At first it seems baffling that it could take up to 7 litres of water to make a bottle of water or 140 litres to make a cup of coffee. The statistics get worse when you look into meat and dairy production with 2,000 litres of water going into 1 litre of milk or 1kg of beef. Where is all this water going?

In the case of coffee, it is a very thirsty crop, often grown in a hot climate. It is also grown in countries where irrigation systems have been stretched to the max, these tired systems can be inefficient with the water they carry.

With bottled water it is the bottle itself that is the culprit. To make the plastic, mould it, mass produce it and maintain the factory where it is created.

For beef and dairy it is not just the water that the cows consume, it is the water that it takes to grow the food they eat. The grass or corn or alfalfa that they eat needs water to grow and one average cow can consume up to 76kg of grass per day.

So is water labeling the solution? I do believe that we as consumers need to become more aware of the amount of 'virtual water' we consume. In Ireland it is often easy to forget that water isn't so easy to come by elsewhere. I have just finished reading Fred Pearce's 'When The Rivers Run Dry' which paints a pretty bleak picture of our world teetering on the edge of water poverty. Centuries of bad water practices, of dams and irrigation systems that rob some rivers of so much of their flow that they fail to reach the sea. Of drained and polluted aquifiers, of farmers who dig wells deeper and deeper yet they still run dry. Each of us need to take responsibility for the amount of virtual water we consume, we may switch off the tap whilst we're brushing our teeth but to really make a difference perhaps we should cut down on the amount of coffee we drink, the amount of bottled water we buy or the amount of meat and dairy we consume? Water labeling will educate us, will make us aware but my fear is that another label on our food, without a massive marketing campaign to back it up, could just be lost amongst our certified organic, fair trade, carbon footprint and nutritional information.

Download the report here.