Ranelagh’s pea champs win food garden worth €3,000

A GREEN team from the Southside has won a major gardening competition that saw them walk away with €5,000 in prizes.

Earlier this year GIY and Cully & Sully teamed up for the second time to launch the fun workplace growing initiative ‘Give Peas A Chance’.

Teams from workplaces around Ireland and the UK were challenged to grow peas at work and complete challenges as they grew. 

 The winning team, Aura Leisure from Ranelagh, were announced as the Irish Give Peas a Chance winners.

They have won a food garden worth €3,000 that they were abel to donate to a worthy cause of their choice plus €2,000 worth of vouchers for Ballymaloe House and Cookery School to treat themselves with.

 Their chosen charity is Laura Lynn, Ireland’s Children’s Hospice.

Claire Shiels at LauraLynn said they were absolutely thrilled to be getting a GIY garden donated by the Aura Holohan Group after they won the competition.

“We have had just a small gardening table inside the hospice until now,” she explained.

“We are super-excited to be getting the real thing.

“The children and families attending LauraLynn will get huge enjoyment and benefit from this wonderful gift – a gift that keeps on giving.

“We cannot thank the teams at Aura, Cully & Sully and GIY enough.” 

 Five hundred teams from companies and organisations across Ireland took up the challenge.

All sections of the workforce were well represented from radio presenters, accountants, retailers, hotel staff, security guards, journalists and many others.

The challenges set by Cully & Sully were designed to spark imagination, help with team building and demonstrate the ease with which food can be grown. 

 This dedicated team from Aura Leisure, dubbed ‘The PeaDiddie’s, were declared the overall winners because of their food growing passion, the quality of their social media engagement, their completion of the challenges and their humour.

Ailish Shaw at Aura Leisure said: “We are absolutely thrilled to be winners of this year’s Give Peas a Chance competition.

“It is an honour to be able to donate our GIY garden to LauraLynn, a truly deserving charity, and we know it will be put into great use.

“We have to thank the team at Cully & Sully for the amazing opportunity.

“The entire competition was thoroughly enjoyable as was  the lunch we received at our offices in Ranelagh as we were presented with our prizes.”

 The founder of GIY, Michael Kelly, said: “This campaign has been phenomenally successful for two years in a row.

“It captures the imagination, it’s fun and it’s easy. This year in Ireland over 3,000 people grew food at work. If you can grow peas on your desk you can see that food growing is not this niche, secret skill.

“It gives people that start in food growing, takes away the fear of the unknown or fear of failure. Now they’ve done it and they can do it again, at home or at work.” 

If you want to help your company to GIY@Work, take a peak at www.giyinternational.org

 Pictured are the winning team of the GIY and Cully & Sully growing food at work competition ‘Give Peas A Chance’. Aura Leisure from Ranelagh, Dublin present their chosen charity the Laura Lynn, Ireland’s Children’s hospice with a €3,000 food garden prize.