By MARG APPLEBEE CENTRAL WEST LACHLAN LANDCARE We are pleased to share our Homegrown Parkes dates for 2025! Our autumn event will be held on Saturday, March 29 and our Spring event will be held on Saturday, October 11. The March 29 event will coincide with the Masters Games in Parkes, which will provide an opportunity for visitors to fill their Saturday in Parkes with plenty of good food and local produce! After Homegrown Parkes won the Community Spirit and Inclusion Award at the Keep Australia Beautiful Tidy Towns NSW Awards, we thought it was only fitting that when Parkes hosts the Tidy Towns Awards in October, that we share our event with visitors to our Shire as part of the weekend event. We have been thrilled with the response from the community, stallholders and food vendors for our October 2024 Homegrown Parkes event. Thank you for your feedback! Homegrown Parkes is an opportunity for local and regional businesses who are processing, repurposing, sewing, propagating or producing fabulous local products to share their skill and products with the community. I would encourage potential stallholders to submit an Expression of Interest early. You can find the link to the registration via our facebook page or on our website. Applications are reviewed by our Homegrown Parkes Committee to ensure that they fit with the ethos of the Homegrown Parkes event. All stallholders and food vendors are required to provide $20 million insurance Certificate of Currency and food vendors need to supply their Food Safety Certificate. We will continue to place a fee on stallholders for our March 2025 event. We want to keep the event as accessible as possible, particularly for small stallholders. The fee of $30 will assist with covering the costs to sustain the event. Demonstrations will again be one of the highlights of the next event on Saturday, March 29, 2025, highlighting processes for using locally produced food and products with the aim of encouraging locals to have a go and grow in their own backyard. Next week I will be sharing some ideas for preparing to be involved in Crop Swap and other activities as part of the March event. The Homegrown Parkes Committee, is made up of members of Central West Lachlan Landcare, Parkes Community Arts and Parkes Shire Council, are looking forward to delivering two fabulous, encouraging and inspirational events in 2025. For further information on this article, please go to www.centralwestlachlanlandcare.org, twitter, facebook or Instagram @cwllandcare
