Woohoo! It's Folia Faire time again!

It’s that time of the year again! Like any good village faire, we’re holding a friendly contest to find the biggest, best and most beautiful plants and gardens on Folia.

To remind you of all the fun we had last year, here were the winners for 2009.

This year we are going to change the way that the nomination and vote process works a little bit – you’ll find a nomination form here that you can fill out to nominate your favourite for each category. Voting is anonymous – if you want to add reasons why you nominated each one, feel free! We’ll compile the best comments and display on the final award results page.

You can fill out as many as you like, and you can nominate yourself if you want. Try to include links where possible as it will make it easier for us to tally and to award the winners. The only rule is: the nominee needs be a member of Folia, and the journal, plant or garden needs to be posted on Folia to be eligible.

Let the Faire begin! Voting will be open from 14 Nov – 30 Nov 2010

Folia Village Faire Nomination Form 2010

Along with the main nominated categories, as part of the Faire you’ll notice that we’ll be releasing a ton of interesting new awards and badges over the coming weeks (so far, this weekend we have just released the Old Growth badge, the First Sprout badge and the First Bloom badge, with plenty more on the way) For more info on what badges have already been released, hints on new badges and to make suggestions for new ones we should consider join our new Folia Badges group!

Announcing the 2009 Folia Faire!

We thought it was high time that we organised something that celebrated and recognised all the amazing things that happen on folia – so we’re officially going to have the inaugural Folia Village Faire in November, and we need your help to start organising it!

What we’re thinking is just like a village faire, we have a competition with categories that everyone can enter. Think categories like “biggest pumpkin”, “Weirdest shaped vegetable”, “Most perfect tomato”, “Most beautiful bloom”, “Most creative growing container”…you get the idea :) Quirky is great, but more serious categories are welcome too.

Categories can be suggested by everyone over the next couple of weeks, and we’ll then shortlist the ones we like the best.

We’ll then call for entries for each category, and everyone can cast their vote during a set period in November. We’ll do a big announcement and a newsletter to let everyone know when to vote – entries will be need to be anything grown / done within the last 12 months: meaning October 08 – November 09. This should hopefully cover everyone in both hemispheres equally.

After the voting period, the results will be tallied and we’ll declare the winners who will all get some marvelous badges to show off on their profiles / websites / blogs, and we’ll also giveaway some free memberships, stickers, badges and whatever else we can find for certain categories.

We’ll also be contacting some companies to see if they’d like to offer any fabulous prizes – if you know of a company that might be interested in getting involved (in exchange for advertising perhaps?) we’d love you to let us know about it!

So, we’ve got the best part of the month to start getting this happening – as with everything around here, if you have any suggestions on how we can organise this or if you’d like to volunteer as a faire helper let us know!

I’ll create a group for the Faire in the next couple of days so we have a place to start organising…watch this space!

Edit: The Folia Faire group is now open for business – please come along and join!