Browsing Posts published on April 3, 2006

Bandon Farmer’s Market

Begins: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 at 10:00 AM

Ends: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 at 2:00 PM

Location:

The Old Market Garden

Bandon, Co Cork

Ireland

I was thrilled to receive an email from Dianne Curtin, one of the organisers of the Bandon Farmer’s Market and food writer for the very fine Bandon Opinion. She brought up a few points which I’ll cover here.

The first is the great news that they have added Easter Saturday as an extra market day and if interest continues, they fully intend to move to weekly. I am really delighted for all the organisers and stall-holders. The feedback I got elsewhere was that business was excellent on the day (rather than just people browsing) and the hope is that the strong buzz will continue.

The second thing that Dianne mentioned was that I was incorrect about the lack of eggs at Saturday’s market. She told me that James O’Brien from Valley View Free Range Eggs in Bandon had a stall. His eggs are free range, some produced on his farm and the rest on the farms of specially selected farmers in the immediate Bandon locality.

To quote Dianne:

James works to an extremely high standard and his eggs are quite frankly delicious. He is a smashing guy, a committed food producer and also the founder of the Irish Free Range Egg Producers Association.

I am spitting that I missed his stand. I think his may have been one of those that was so mobbed I couldn’t get anywhere near it. I’ll be stocking up at the next market.

Dianne also mentioned the Ballinscarthy ladies next door to James who had a few trays of their own free range eggs which were snapped up in no time, as were all their home baked cakes made with free range eggs.

I assume these are the “Five Ladies From Ballinscarthy” that John McKenna mentioned? They should use that as their brand!

I’m looking forward to checking out both stalls and all the others I missed the last time.

If you are wondering where the Market is on, have a look at this map on Microsoft Live Local.

Once again I encourage everyone to attend the Bandon Market whether they live in Bandon, Ballincollig, Ballinspittle, Barryroe, Ballineen, Butlerstown or Boston.

[tags]Bandon Farmers Market[/tags]

Like many geeks, I signed up for Riya the moment they went into public beta. This is a photo sharing site like many others (e.g. Flickr) but with the twist that it has advanced “AI” techniques for recognising faces. So if you upload many pictures of the same people and train Riya a bit, then in future it will be automatically able to recognise those people in future photos and tag them accordingly for search purposes.

Along with the usual sharing features like tagging and albums etc, it is a pretty sweet service. It is still under development and to be honest, I find it very confusing to use. The whole training vs viewing vs sharing is very fuzzy.

For the laugh I used all the photos I took at the Farmer’s Market and uploaded them and identified the people whose names I knew. So apologies to Anthony, Don, Ruth, Frank and Dianne but you’ve been framed :-)

Obviously, if you really object, then I’ll delete the identifiers.

Check it out at: Bandon Farmer’s Market on Riya
[tags]Riya, Bandon Farmers Market[/tags]