Episode 18: Baking Bread, Building Community with Ciara O’Hartghaile

When Ciara O’hartghaile returned home to Co Antrim, after a year living in New Zealand, she and her husband had a clear mission: to build a community around love of good food, in their home town of Ballycastle.

They started to bake high quality sourdough bread in the small domestic oven of their rented apartment, just three loaves at a time. Today, they run the highly successful Ursa Minor Bakehouse café, a cookery school, and a professional bakery turning out 300 loaves a day!

Check out Ciara’s award-winning Substack about food and life on the North Coast – Gorse

GIY are proud to align our mission, vision and impact with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In response to the urgency of the climate crisis, and in line with the UN Decade of Action, our ambition at GIY is to inspire 100 million people around the world to grow some of their own food by 2030.

In this episode

Ciara joins Mick Kelly of GIY to share the story of building their business, creating a food community around it, and her views on how to make a better food system.

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Check out these other great episodes

Episode 23: From Chef to Seed Saver: The Journey of Mitch McCulloch

Episode 11: Fighting for a Fairer Food System, with Pete Russell, Ooooby

Pete Russell was running a 12m dollar-a-year food company when, suddenly, he had a “road to Damascus” moment. Pete realised that he was a part of a broken food system that was loaded against small food producers, and he knew that he wanted to be part of the solution rather than the problem.

Episode 10: The Power of Permaculture, with Perrine Hervé-Gruyer

When we work with, rather than against nature, great things can happen: soil is healthier, biodiversity richer, and crop yields higher. Perrine Hervé-Gruyer learned this first-hand when she and her husband created The Bec Hellouin farm in Normandy, France in 2006. Determined to work in harmony with nature, and with no previous farming experience, they gave up their successful careers to build a market garden based on the principles of permaculture. And the results have been ground-breaking.