Following the success of last year’s Open Gate Festival, the Healthiest Town team are excited to announce the line up for this year's Open Gate Festival.  It will run from 29 August to 7 September with lots of open gardens and farms, workshops, talks and events running throughout the festival period.  

 

As well as many gardens and farms being open for us to visit, and a host of practical workshops on growing, foraging and producing food, we will have a range of talks, films and events.  We will be re-launching the Aberfeldy Manifesto, written in 1974, at the Just One Ingredient event, looking at how we can use this call to action to help us all eat better, improve our health and reduce negative climate impacts.  We also will be hosting a community feast to celebrate our amazing community and delicious local produce.  We are delighted to have all of our local schools involved in the Open Gate Festival - our young people have so much to teach us.  We are also spreading the Open Gate Festival further with events and activities in other areas around Highland Perthshire - Crieff and Comrie, Dunkeld and Birnam, and Pitlochry.  ​

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We are fortunate that Highland Perthshire is home to many homegrowers. As part of Open Gate, many have been encouraged to open their gates to the public to highlight what they achieve and encourage others to get started. These will be informal tours and we really do thank people for taking the time to share their skills and passion for homegrown food with us. 

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Healthiest Town's Open Gate festival has connecting people to locally produced nutritious food at its core  - we want people to consider the impact of what we choose to eat and the way our food is grown, produced and processed has on our health and the planet's health.

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With our supermarkets packed with highly-processed food, imported and promoted by multinationals, we want to counter this by promoting local producers and growers, share awareness of the links between the health of our local environment and the health of our communities, and at a very simple level encourage people to grow their own food or get involved in food growing/producing community projects and to support small, local enterprises by buying (and eating) their produce.

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Subsidised tickets: Many of our events and all of the productive garden tours are free to attend, but we do have to charge for some of the activities to help cover our costs. However, we want Open Gate to be accessible to all and we understand that the cost can be beyond some people's mean, and so we do have some further subsidised tickets available - please do get in contact to find out more info@healthiesttown.org.