Elaine Garde

Throughout her career Elaine Garde has worked primarily on environmental related art projects with a focus on education. Her body of work is broad as are her mediums and she has been part of many creative campaigning projects with an emphasis on justice and change. Her work has included a Labyrinth at Cork’s Crawford Gallery for Capital of Culture 2005, minting of the Sovereign Earth Bond Coin in 2011 and Portal map to Abundance launched at Dublin Culture Night 2012. She has had some very successful solo shows in Cork’s Tigh Fili and was awarded the title of ‘Working Class Hero’ for Cork in 2013.

She attended a 10 day Erasmus programme in Amsterdam on ‘The Art of Change-making in 2014. She currently delivers biodiversity workshops through the Heritage Council and has spent many of her recent years developing the award winning Eco project ‘Future Orchard Cork’

Future Food Forests and Carbon Sinkage

We believe to look forward most effectively is to learn from the past. The future is scary, with climate impact on our food security being probably our biggest worry. But humans have gotten this far primarily because of our connection to the land. This is something we are losing as we migrate towards cities and urban areas. But the land is still there and we can establish a new relationship with it – but not on our own.

Pooling resources – financial / creative / knowledge and skills can create real resilience. Our project has been working to be a model of group ownership of small parcels of cheap marginal land and turning it, not only into future food forests, but increasingly important carbon sinks for our communities.

One hectare of land, 46 varieties of apples

Working sensitively with the land, Future Orchard aims to create wealth by Security of Tenure, under Collective Ownership. You are welcome to join us. Collectively owned award-winning eco enterprise. Starting share value: 1,000 Euro. Shares are still available. Weekly payments of 5 Euro is possible.

After 12 years of graft our project now houses a broad range of Irish Heritage Apples, Hazel and Cob-nuts, unusual Soft Fruits and a dozen varieties of colourful Basket Willow. We have used shareholder investment to plant, fence, maintain, develop storage and teaching spaces and maintain adequate parking.

Located in the beautiful Sarsfield’s Court area on the new boundary of Cork City, Future Orchard is a small-scale organic ecological enterprise, using a model that obviates the need for loans, capital investment, or any dependency on grants. We invite shareholding with a commitment of financial support which can be sent in tiny increments to a committee managed credit union account. We have shares available but they are limited. The plan is that, in time, we will register a formal limited co-operative, and that the membership will be official shareholders sharing the profits generated by our endeavours.

We see our future as a small scale producer offering interesting Horticulture courses and creative Forest School type activities for children’s groups. We now have planning permission to open a new safer entrance onto the R616. We have a busy apiary and plant intensively to maximise the biodiversity. However we are already situated in a beautiful area with 30 hectares of woodland and the bountiful Glashaboy River adjoining our land so it’s already a haven for all sorts of critters. Private wild camping experiences for small groups can be arranged. Some areas of our project are dedicated to family and friends as memorial gardens.

This Project offers a blueprint for other groups to buy land and work collectively.