Hi Leanne here. A few years ago my old uni housemate encouraged me to strip my olive 🫒 tree of fruit and add them to the harvest from his house in Brunswick. And he kindly took all our fruit off to magically become olive oil.

When I got the oil back it was such a joy to think it came from my tree!

This year you can do the same thing … just register and then drop off your olives at CERES Fair Food at 20 Water Rd Preston (not the East Brunswick site) and it will be magically returned in the form of oil.

Thanks to Darebin, Yarra and Moreland Councils, CERES and 3000Acres for organising this great community activity.

And … if you’ve never done it before a good tip is to lay a big sheet under your tree and invest in a couple of plastic kids beach/sandpit rakes. Then you can rake along the branches. The rakes will pull the olives off without pulling the leaves off … and the olives will drop down onto the sheet … and you can then gather that up and tip your harvest into your collection container. It makes the process so much quicker than hand picking …

Here’s the official advertising blurb for the event. Thanks Nat from Darebin for sending it through! I am sure there will be people in our community super keen to join in.

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The Olives to Oil Harvest Festival is coming to Darebin, in partnership with CERES 3000acres.

Come together over the weekend of 27-29 May to harvest olives from streets, parks and productive gardens. The olives will be pressed communally into delicious, local olive oil and distributed back to the people who help with the harvest. 

Drop off your freshly picked olives at CERES Fair Food (Preston) on Sunday 29 May 12-2pm. Collect your oil from Reservoir Library two weeks later.

For more information email olivestooil@ceres.org.au or register here: https://www.3000acres.org/olives-to-oil

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.

Join Clare in the garden on Saturday 30 April from 10am-12pm to learn all about worm towers - and work together as a family (if you like or by yourself if you prefer) to make one for your garden.

Worm towers are tubes that are half buried directly in the garden. You add kitchen scraps in the top and the worms do their magical thing from below - right where you need them the most!

In this workshop we’ll provide all the equipment and materials needed to make your tower and decorate it beautifully so it becomes garden art.

Only $15. Morning tea provided. Enrol here under the workshops tab.

This workshop is part of The Garden State Festival - and supported by The Plant Society and Yarra City Council.

It’s always nice to end the term with a crowd, and it was lovely to have so many people along on Friday morning for Arty Gardening followed by Morning Tea. It was a gorgeous morning.

So many things were happening … we had Crystal drawing flowers, Sandra and Mark picking herbs to make little wardrobe bags to keep the bugs out of clothes and things smelling nice, Debra setting up seed trays (we’re getting some calendula and pak choy seeds sprouting hopefully) and Derek and David helping Clare in the shed to drill the holes in our soon to be finished worm towers.

And then we had more people turn up for morning tea - on the menu the most AMAZING chocolate biscuits made by Kinfolk.

In the garden this week Clare planted some more natives out on the front corner. And we dug some fertiliser in to the second productive garden bed in the front yard so it’s ready for a new crop to be planted when we are back.

Which will be on Tuesday 26 April.

So happy Easter, we hope the Easter bunny visits you … and we’ll see you on the other side of the school holidays! If you need to get in contact with us during this time please email info@alphington.org.au.

This Friday our lovely crafty friends Marie-Louise and Anne added some ADDITIONAL craft bling to our already craft-blinged tree in the community shed garden … now it looks extra fabulous.

Anne uses up all her wool scraps and turns them into pompoms - and we are very grateful to be the lucky recipients.

Thanks ladies! Your crafty goodness is good for us all!