Harvest festival at Rattray Community Garden this weekend!

Image courtesy of Clare McMicking/CraicN Communication

Volunteers at Rattray Community Garden are inviting local residents to join them this

Saturday, September 12th , for the Garden’s first harvest festival.

Located just off Balmoral Road in the east Perthshire town, the Community Garden will be open from 1pm to 4pm for the harvest festival.

Members of the public are encouraged to have a look around the garden, enjoy light refreshments including home-baking, browse a selection of plants for sale, and take away some locally grown vegetables for a small donation.

Amongst the vegetables that will be available are potatoes, carrots, beans, courgettes, and tomatoes.

Rattray Community Garden, a Blairgowrie and Rattray Development Trust (BRDT) project, aims to bring people together for the community experience of growing food and flowers within a welcoming space.

The idea is that the Garden supports health and wellbeing and local food growing, helps people to improve their gardening skills, and reduces social isolation.

The purchase and redevelopment of the community garden was highlighted as something local people wanted as part of the community action plan consultation exercise carried out in Blairgowrie and Rattray.

Since securing the site for the community four years ago, a team of volunteers has worked tirelessly to develop the space into a beautiful and bountiful garden.

Jean Smith, a volunteer at Rattray Community Garden, is looking forward to the harvest festival.

She said: “Traditionally, harvest festivals have been annual celebrations held around the time of the main crop gathering and where food and produce was shared with local communities, and it is this ethos that we are aiming to recreate at our own harvest festival.

“From the outset, those involved with Rattray Community Garden have been committed to making locally grown vegetables accessible to more of our community, and our harvest festival this weekend is one of the ways we are doing just that.

“As well as sharing locally grown, organic produce with local residents, which helps to reduce food miles, the hope is that this event will also generate a small bit of income for the Garden, which will allow us to continue to develop the space.”

The Garden is open to everyone in the community on Wednesdays and Saturdays between 10am and 1pm and provides an open space for people to come and relax, enjoy the garden or help out with the activities – everything from planting and weeding to harvesting and using the produce.

To find out more about Rattray Community Garden, including how you can get involved in supporting the work it is doing, follow the Facebook page by searching for ‘Rattray Community Garden’, visit the website at www.rattraycommunitygarden.org.uk or email [email protected]

For further information or media enquiries, please contact Clare McMicking on 07514 343 042 or [email protected]

Supported by Rural Perth & Kinross Community-Led Local Development (RPK CLLD) Local Action Group (LAG) with funding from the Scottish Government’s Rural Community-Led Local Development Fund 2024/25, part of the Scottish Rural Development Programme (SRDP).