New GIY Market Garden announced at Curraghmore Estate
People in Waterford and beyond will be able to sign up to receive a weekly box of organically grown produce from July 2024
Print8 February 2024
In mid-2022, GIY, a multi-award-winning social enterprise, announced its ambition to find additional land to expand the group’s food education and production activities. It has now signed a lease with Curraghmore Estate in Portlaw, Co. Waterford to create the GIY Market Garden.
The GIY Market Garden at Curraghmore Estate will be a mixed-use organic smallholding with traditional breed poultry, pigs and field-scale veg and fruit following regenerative agriculture principles. It will be based within the 19th century 12-acre walled garden at the Curraghmore Estate which is one of the largest walled gardens anywhere in Ireland and the UK.
Founder of GIY Michael Kelly says that the new partnership with the Curraghmore Estate will build on the success of GROW HQ to create a regenerative food education campus in Waterford that will be a model of a sustainable food system with a mixture of food production, education, enterprise and tourism.
“We are delighted to announce that we will be turning the sod on the new GIY Market Garden this spring,” he said.
The next steps for the project will see preparation for planting for spring 2024 across seven acres with the first food production and harvest underway through 2024.
Kelly says GIY would also like to see the walled garden restored to some of its former glory. “At one stage the walled garden would have employed 40 gardeners and supplied the estate and Portlaw itself with produce,” he said. “It was pioneering and innovative for its time and was the first workplace of rewilding pioneer William Robinson. We would ultimately love to restore some of the garden buildings as education spaces.”
This project was approved by government with support from the Dormant Accounts Fund.
People in Waterford and beyond will be able to sign up to receive a weekly box of organically grown produce from the GIY Walled Garden from July 2024. GIY has launched a registration process for people to find out more and sign up for the waiting list at www.GIY.ie
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