Date and Location
These are now confirmed, and as follows:
20 September 2008, 9:30am – 5:30pm
Oxford Botanic Garden, High Street, Oxford
Coffee and Tea provided
Costs
I am not looking to make any profit on this, so I will total up the costs at the end and ask everyone to pay a portion of this according to the number of people who attend.
I expect this to be about £10-15 per person, including entrance fee to the garden.
An International Event
Kate from Hills and Plains Seedsavers will travel from Australia to be with us! I will come from Amsterdam.
Accommodation in Oxford
I expect most people attending will travel to and from their homes, but if you want to stay overnight in Oxford rooms are available at some of the colleges. I will be staying at Queen’s College, within walking distance of the Botanic Garden.
Limited Spaces Available
There are a very limited number of seats available. The room we have holds exactly 25 people, and there is simply no space for anyone else to stand to the side or to squeeze in one more chair. I hope to accommodate everyone who wants to attend, but may have to turn away some late comers. It’s very important you tell me if you decide later not to attend, otherwise your seat will be empty and someone else may miss the opportunity to come.
For anyone who has not already told me they want to attend, I’m afraid I won’t be able to confirm space until closer to the time. Please let me know as soon as possible if you are interested.
Are you expecting to come, but you don’t see a link to your blog below? Get in touch, it probably means I’ve forgotten about you.
Is there a link to your blog below, but you don’t plan to come? Let me know! Someone else wants your seat(s).
I will be sending emails in August to everyone confirming their attendance. If you will be away all or most of August, please let me know in advance so I can confirm this with you before you leave.
Picnic
Rain or shine we will have a picnic, so bring any food you want to share with others. Since most of us are gardeners, consider bringing something from your garden, but anything you want to bring is fine.
Also bring something to sit on, and anything else you want for the picnic.
Our room can be locked, so personal belongings can be left inside while we go outdoors.
In case of bad weather, we can eat indoors.
Seed Swap
Be sure to bring any seeds or other propagation materials you want to share with others. I will bring some seeds and other things from my garden.
The most interesting of course are seeds you have grown and saved yourself, but don’t be afraid to bring any seeds you think anyone else might be interested in.
You don’t need to bring seeds in order to receive them from others.
Speakers Needed!
At the moment we don’t have any speakers scheduled, except I plan to say a few words about what I’m growing in my garden. If you would like to talk about your garden or anything else, please let me know. Please let me know if you have other ideas about people we might invite, or just things you would like to hear about.
With or without speakers the event will go ahead. If necessary we will just chat with each other, or walk around the gardens, but it will be a lot more interesting if we can find some people to speak to us too.
Sunday
The main event is on Saturday, but I will be around Sunday as well. Are you interested in making informal plans on this day too? Let me know. Kate from Hills and Plains will be around Sunday too. I may visit some people’s gardens or allotments this day.
Other Get-Togethers
Ours is not the only blogger’s get together being planned! On August 24th in a number of places in Australia, France and the US there will be several blogging/food growing gardener get-togethers. Have a look on Ian’s blog for more details. If you are planning or know of other get-togethers, please leave a comment below and let people know about it.
MustardPlaster
Spade Work
Daughter of the Soil
The plot thickens
Vegmonkey and the Mrs.
Joanna’s Food
Growing Our Own
The smallest smallholding
A Blog Called Fuggles
Veg Plotting
Soilman’s Allotment Blog
My Tiny Plot
Manor Stables Veg Plot
Fluffius Muppetus
NomeGrown
Purple Podded Peas
A Nice Green Leaf
Hills and Plains
Fabulous – what a huge lot of work you’ve put into this … I’ll be there, and looking forward to it. I’ve put the date in my diary
Thank you so much for organising this
Joanna
Wow that looks like it will be informative and fun. I’ll hope one or more of the many bloggers attending will be recording the event. BTW: The scorzonera seeds you send me are growing well.
Hi Patrick,
We won’t be able to attend due to prior commitments, which is a real shame. I’ve heard the botanic gardens are really nice and chilled, so this really is a missed opportunity. Have a good one though!
Veg and the Mrs.
Hi Patrick, put me down for one. You’ve done a great job organising this, thank you. It’ll be good to meet everyone. As it’s a blog-meet I think it would be interesting if a few of us got up on the old soap box, I’d like to think I could find something interesting to talk about for ten minutes or so. Are we looking to invite some speakers too, or were you thinking it would be exclusively invited speakers?
Simon
Joanna and OG: Thanks for the nice words.
VM: Sorry you can’t come. It would have been nice to meet the two of you. Maybe next year. Thanks for letting me know.
Simon: I’m planning to say something along the same lines, only a few minutes, just long enough for everyone to see I’m not really a very good public speaker but to get an idea of who I am. I’ll put you on the list of speakers as well. I hope others will step forward too.
As far as who we invite, I really would like to hear what all of you think too, but I was hoping to find some outside people. It seems to me we will be right next to a university that probably has some interesting people associated with it, if we could find them. Especially if some of you reading this could help out too, we might be able to find some other possibly non-university people too.
Some people expect to be paid to speak at an event like this, but I had in mind looking for people who would speak for free. We aren’t really a large enough group that I think wants to pay lots of money for speakers. Perhaps if we do this again next year, and have twice as many people, we could think about taking up a collection to pay for speakers if enough people were interested.
Of course we probably have to offer free entrance to our event and the Botanic Garden to any speakers, and perhaps pay some travel costs. It might be hard to find someone if we don’t at least offer to cover their expenses.
Since speakers would use a seat another blogger might want, and as a result increase everyone’s shared costs a little, whoever we invite should be worthwhile. Also, since the whole idea is to get together and meet each other, we don’t want to fill the whole day with speakers because we want some time to chat and maybe see the Botanic garden too.
I was sort of thinking along the lines of one or two speakers or perhaps 2 hours in total, but at the same time if we find a number of interesting people we may try to accommodate more. Of course we should accommodate as many bloggers that want to speak.
I was sort of thinking about this as a possible program:
9:30 – 10:30 Arrival. Coffee and tea.
10:30 – 11:30 Invited Speaker
11:30 – 12:30 Speaking bloggers and seed swap
12:30 – 14:00 Picnic
14:00 – 15:00 Invited Speaker
15:00 – 17:30 Visit gardens or chat inside if it’s raining.
If we have more speakers, we could schedule them in somewhere.
Anyway, this is all just an idea, so please speak up if you have other suggestions!
It probably goes without saying that we need to find speakers before we can invite them, so if we can’t find anyone there won’t be anyone to speak to us.
That looks excellent. My first choice would be Dr Richard Wiltshire who’s an expert on allotments. Allotments are my own particular interest. They’re central to the local food debate and they’re important for many social and cultural reasons too. This is him – http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/geography/people/acad/wiltshire
Maybe someone from the Soil Association’s Local Food thing might be interested: http://www.localfoodworks.org/
Of the famous worthies I’m not sure there’s many of them I’d be interested in hearing, but I have a lot of respect for Bob Flowerdew
and I’m sure he’d be challenging if we could persuade him to come.
I’ll see what other ideas occur and I encourage everyone else to make suggestions too.
Simon
Hi Simon,
Thanks!
I’ve sent Dr. Wiltshire an email and asked him. I’ve also got a couple of emails pending with other people, so I’ll follow up on your other suggestions once I know about the people I’m already trying to contact.
Since classes are not in session, I hope academics are answering their email now.
Dr. Wiltshire is busy and can’t come.
Ooh, would love to come (although need to double check with the OH that he can do childcare that day…) Happy to speak, too, if you’d like – about my book, what it’s like editing the Guardian’s gardening pages, whatever. Will let you know if I am definitely available ASAP …
Jane: It would be great to both meet you and hear you speak! I hope you can come.
I just got an email from Kate of The Real Seed Catalogue. She said they would be happy to come and speak.
She said they normally only do local events, and pointed out the train from Wales to Oxford is not cheap. As a group, we would need to pay for this. It would probably costs us £2-3 each more than a speaker from London for example, but I think still leave us well within the £10-15 each I was originally planning on.
What does everyone think about this?
I think it’s all sounding very good indeed. Big round of applause for your organizational skills.
Patrick hi
This sounds terrific and you’ve worked enormously hard on it. I’ll be there, for sure!
Hi Patrick
I’m so sorry I’ve been rubbish about replying. Things have been quite hectic and not great (issues with sick pets, family problems, sick grandmother, money issues etc etc), and I’m not entirely sure I’ll be able to make it. Finances have been ridiculously tight for the past 4 months so for me it’s a case of wait and see. I know this is no help to you at all – what’s the latest you need to know definitively by?
Lucy
Hi Lucy,
I have you down for two seats, is that right?
At the moment the get-together is fully booked, but there are no other people who say they want to come. A perfect situation really! I guess if you can’t confirm by the end of August, I might like to offer your seats to someone else who says they can definitely come. At the same time, if no one else steps forward, there’s no reason to ask you to give up your seats and you can wait until the last minute to decide.
I hope you can come!
I’m going to do another post on this soon, and give everyone an update on where things stand.
I’m so glad this is all on! And i was going to say can’t we ask jane to say something. Personally i would love to hear about Rebsie’s pea breeding too but I know she is shy having tried once to interview her!
Whew, I’ll be very sorry I can’t join you all, but I’m sure we’ll get a full report on one of these pages.