Despite a chilly start to the morning, the sun came out for a perfect day last weekend as the Mount Pleasant Farmers Market celebrated the beginning of Spring at the S.A. Spring Garden Festival, held annually in September. Returning to its original one-day format in 2022, around 3,500 garden lovers made the picturesque journey to Mount Pleasant in the Barossa Valley on Saturday, where the festival ran in conjunction with the weekly Mount Pleasant Farmers Market.
Communications Officer for the market, Nicki Nolan, said the festival was a wonderful day. “In addition to our regular 30 farmers market stalls, with the freshest produce in the region, we had a fabulous variety of around 50 plant, garden and homewares stalls”, she said.
“Our vendors had a great day and they’re already excitedabout coming back next year”. “There was so much to see and do; we had kid’s activities, live music, and of course lots of delicious food, drinks, and wine.”
Garden expert and special guest speaker Kim Syrus, from Channel Nine’s In The Garden and Outdoors Indoors, gave two talks to a full house, where he shared his expertise on roses and easy gardening.
Nicki said, “We also had some fantastic talks on topics such as edible native Australian plants, growing fruit trees and seed saving, as well as a Beekeeping Experience workshop. Everyone was so excited to be able to go out and celebrate the coming Spring together in the sunshine. Mount Pleasant Farmers Market manager Chelsea Honner did an amazing job of organising the event and we had a huge amount of support from our community. And of course, we couldn’t have made it such a successful event without the help of our volunteers. I think it’s only going to get bigger and better, because we’ve just had such wonderful feedback.”
With the S.A. Spring Garden Festival now over for 2022, the market team are making plans for future events. Nicki said, “There’s a lot of exciting things going on at the market. We’re working on making our weekly farmers market bigger and better, and we have a new artisan market that’s going to be starting in November, so we’re really looking forward to that too. Our Christmas twilight market is happening on 22nd December, which is always huge, and we’ve already started planning for next year’s S.A. Spring Garden Festival.”
The Mount Pleasant Farmers Market is on every Saturday from 8am-12pm.
