The first Illawarra Edible Garden Trail was held on 11 and 12 November at gardens from Helensburgh to Woonona. Anna Jane Linke, the trail's program manager, reports.

After 11 months of pulling the strings together for the Illawarra’s first Edible Garden Trail, we couldn’t have asked for a better weekend!

Thanks to our partner Food Fairness Illawarra, and sponsors Gilly’s Kitchen Garden and Treemates, over two glorious days 304 lovely folk visited 18 gardens between Helensburgh and Woonona. Ages ranged from five to 65 years, with half the attendees familiar with growing food and the other half new to it.

It was such a pleasure to take a look at rambling verge gardens tucked in back lanes and walk through mulched paths brimming with bees and produce in backyards, community and school gardens. But what was even better were the casual conversations and flavour of familiarity with the same friendly faces I encountered in different gardens over the Saturday and Sunday.

When our Otford committee (Claudia, Grant, Zan and myself) came together to talk shop back in January we couldn’t have fathomed the many strings that needed to come together for an event of this size. We were inspired by Susan Rix, who started the Blue Mountains Edible Garden Trail back in 2018, and thought that the Illawarra was ripe for something similar.

We decided to start small and pilot the trail in the Northern Illawarra this year and then expand it to Wollongong in subsequent years if the trail was successful. One of the reasons we started small was that we wanted to connect communities in smaller areas as we went. Despite some community pushback for limiting the scope of this year's trail, we’re very pleased we did. It turned out to be a lot more work than we imagined and starting small allowed us to gain valuable lessons so we can scale it up in future years.

There were a lot of big steps and wins on the organisational side of things. We started by partnering with Food Fairness Illawarra (FFI). FFI is a community coalition that brings together businesses, organisations and community members to drive the Illawarra's fair food conversation.

Berbel, Kelly and the entire Healthy Cities team were able to provide invaluable support to a fledgling project like ours in the form of insurance, marketing reach, a physical space for storage and much more. In return, we brought together their community of growers in a one-off weekend. True collaborative partnerships like this are rare and precious, and we hope to be able to weave the trail closer into the fabric of the magic that Food Fairness brings to the Illawarra.

We secured some sponsorship by reaching out to many interested businesses within the Illawarra. Fortunately for us, two in particular, Gilly’s Kitchen Garden and Treemates committed to putting their name and money behind the event and we couldn’t have done it without them.

Grant drew up the initial designs for the branding and Georgia from Leeway Studios jazzed it up into the cheeky cockatoo we hope you know. Then it was time to secure the host gardens. This actually took much more time and effort… we didn’t realise everyone would be so shy about their amazing gardens! Then there were all the logisticis – the ins and outs of the day, the equipment, the promotion and media.

But in the end, about 550 hours later, it all came together better than anything we could have imagined.

What we really wanted to do was connect new and established growers across the region, to boost connections with each other and overall confidence to grow more food and improve food security across the Illawarra.

And we are so pleased that the trail has done just that.

Plans are in the pipeline to extend the trail to Wollongong in 2024, and we’d love your input as the trail expands. If you’d like to be involved, please reach out to us at gardentrail@foodfairnessillawarra.org.au