You may have noticed the beautiful flyer in your letterbox from the Plant Society! But just in case you have missed it there are some for you to pick up in our seed library.

The Plant Society and Yarra City Council are running an inaugural Garden State Festival to celebrate gardening as an art form and to explore the vital role plants play in the art of living this weekend.

Garden State celebrates the intersection between plants, art, architecture, craft, design, food, ideas, music, performance, elevating what it means to be a modern gardener.

The festival has so much to offer. From landscaping workshops to building a table top garden with artist Bec Orpin. As well as our own Worm Tower 101 Workshop here at the ACC!

Check out the program here.

And join our Worm Tower workshop here for just $15 on Saturday 30th from 10am- 12pm. There are a couple of spots left.

Tickets are now on sale. Click here.

Hi Leanne here. Well term one is drawing to a close, and we’ll be taking leave for two weeks from this coming Friday. We will be back on Tuesday 26 April.

We hope you have a happy Easter and a lovely break.

And … If you are keen on a road trip along the lines of a four hour drive to Western Victoria, and a fun community event - I’ll see you at the Cavendish Redgum Festival on the last weekend of the holidays. My sister Merryn helps organise this festival in her tiny country town on the western side of the Grampians, and I am helping out with the catering for the Friday opening event and will also be assisting with the nature craft activities for kids (a specialty of mine as you all know from our events) on Saturday. There’ll also be tethered hot air balloon rides, bus tours to see magnificent trees, music, food and a dog jumping competition … fun!

Click here to find out more about the Cavendish Redgum Festival.

The inaugural ‘people’s choice’ at the Alphington Show goes to Florence Maslen for her beautiful plaited bread.

Thanks Heather for suggesting this new addition to the show - it was a great way to get the community involved on the day.

For anyone yet to collect their entries, please drop by this week - the last few remaining items are in the foyer.

And congratulations once again to all those who entered. It was really fun to see how talented and creative so many people in our community and beyond are.

Alphington Show was so much fun this year! We had glorious weather and lots of people came along and joined in. The pony rides were a real hit and our show entrants were super talented.

We’d like to thank our partners Alphington CWA. It was terrific to run this event together.

We’d also like to thank our friends from the Preston Garden Club for judging (along with the CWA) and Nelson Alexander for helping us publicise the event AND for providing a prize. We had 16 people get a hole in one on our mini-golf green and go into the draw to win the $100 LaTrobe Golf Club voucher… and many more spent quite a while trying!

This year we had 29 entrants in our family friendly, funny and somewhat shambolic dog show. The calibre of entrants was very impressive … we saw the most amazing trick - a dog who retrieved a tissue from a tissue box when their owner sneezed. Beyond impressive! We’d like to thank E and A Salce on High Street Thornbury for the prizes.

We had around 15 stallholders in our makers market with lots of lovely things to buy. We love running events that support local makers.

Finally a big thanks to our volunteers. We had some new helpers this year and along with some old favourites! And we really couldn’t do all the things we do without you.

Oh, and congratulations to all our prize winners … thanks once again everyone!

See you next year!