CENTRAL WEST LACHLAN LANDCARE By MARG APPLEBEE Our Homegrown Parkes Expressions of Interest (EOI) for Stallholders and Food Vendors is open! We have already received nearly 40 EOI for our 11 October event, which is going to be a wonderful Spring celebration, incorporating the NSW Tidy Towns Awards. Due to Homegrown Parkes winning the Community Spirit and Inclusion Award at the Keep Australia Beautiful Tidy Towns NSW Awards in 2024, we thought it was only fitting that when we host the Tidy Towns Awards in October, that we share our event with visitors to our Shire as part of the weekend event. This is your opportunity to demonstrate to our visitors what makes our community so fantastic. We look forward to welcoming visitors from across NSW and showing off the best that Parkes Shire and the Central West have to offer. 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. After review, a follow up email is sent from Homegrown Parkes. 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, 11 October 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. We are thrilled to be welcoming back many of our regular entertainers and a few new inclusions. We also look forward to welcoming some special guests to this event. For further information on this article, please go to www.centralwestlachlanlandcare.org, twitter, facebook or Instagram @cwllandcare
