After two weeks of holidays our new raised garden bed is exploding with colour. Here’s a lovely red poppy in amongst the mix.

Some nice pics from our garden beds today.

We’re hoping to build up our gardening program over the coming year and make the most of our garden space.

If you enjoy gardening you might like to think about joining us on a Friday morning? We’d love to see you when we reopen.

Hi Kalimna here.

I wanted to share with you that Darebin Council have created a seed saving guide!

You can download it from the link here .

You can share your home seed gathering skills by leaving any of your surplus in our little seed library in front of the community centre.

Thanks to whoever dropped off the sweet basil seeds this week … and it’s been lovely to see so many lemons being shared too!

If you came to our last morning tea Kalimna may have sent you home with a home cooked meal. We’ve been contemplating how we can reinvent community lunch 🥙 in corona times.

We had some potatoes kindly donated by Gordon Jones Potatoes 🥔 that came our way via Miranda at Melbourne Farmers Markets that we used to make potato and leek soup.

We’ve got lots of young families in our playgroups and older people who live alone, or care for others (and all those in between) who appreciate a meal cooked by someone else every now and then.

Following this, last week I had an inspiring conversation with Miranda and a bunch of lovely people from Cultivating Community - in relation to possibilities around ongoing community food provision.

Cultivating Community is an organisation that ‘runs food and gardening programs to lay the foundations for healthy communities’. They support public housing tenants across a number of sites to build and maintain community gardens, they provide education experiences through their school food garden program and run workshops on all sorts of garden related things.

And they are increasingly hanging out in the ‘hood with Carys on site four days a week at Alphington Community Farmgate building up the productivity 🥕🥦🥬🍅 of the gardens down there.

Our meeting was looking at how we can collaborate on a regular basis in our immediate neighbourhood to use and distribute some of the produce grown by them, or sourced by Miranda from the producers at the market.

It is really a privilege to work with such creative, go-getting, caring, community minded people!

I’ll update you on the progress as we develop the plan. Happy times.

Hooray! Adam was here all day installing our new cubby and sandpit … doesn’t it all look 👀 great. Thanks Castle and Cubby. We love it.

All the bits and pieces.

The walls going up.

The roof going on.

We just need to fill the sandpit up now … and plant out the garden beds.

And look, some new outdoor tables as well … pop past for a play!