This week we had a donation of apples 🍏 picked straight from the tree delivered to us.

We’ll be using them to make some preserves and to do some community cooking and we also ate some at Morning Tea in the Garden on Friday … and sent some home with those that came along - everyone was very appreciative!

And … any spares will be sent over the the ASRC.

Thanks so much Bella for thinking of us and dropping them in!

If you ever have excess fruit and veggies 🥦 🥕 in your home garden (or on your rural property like Bella) we’re always very pleased to find a use for them - whether that be here - we use them for preserves, weekly morning tea or food relief, or at the ASRC - the donations we send their way go into their fresh food program.

Just give us a call or drop in when we are open!

Lovely to see local Ingrid Svendsen receive an OA for her work establishing the East Timor Hearts Fund this week.

Mark (her partner) who volunteers for the AAA Bowls program shared the news with us on Wednesday at our volunteer morning tea to wrap up another successful term of the program.

And also pointed us in the direction of this article published on LinkdIn, written by Ingrid about accepting the award, that you may also be interested in reading.

We’re coming up to the last week of our podcast this week - we have 3 more episodes to publish.

You can follow along on our website here or check out the podcast where ever you regularly listen to podcasts - apple, google, amazon or spotify.

In the last few days we have published a couple of stories. The first is from local author Chloe Hooper - many of you will have read her books including Tall Man and The Arsonist. She talks about how worried her family was when the pandemic started because her husband Don Watson (also an author) was in remission from leukaemia. Her episode if very thoughtful and insightful and interesting!

Chloe

The next episode features local Fleur - and is all about aborted travel plans - Fleur and her partner Trent and her four boys were all set to head to Singapore in January 2022 when they all came down with Covid. In this episode we also talk to David Bridie (musician with Not Drowning Waving etc.) and also the musician who made the Covid Roulette theme music. He talks about his aborted travel plans as well, including a trip to Antarctica.

He also discusses the impact of the pandemic on some of the musicians from PNG who he works with regularly and are on the Wontok record label.

Fleur

And today we are publishing Ray’s story - which is a very sad one about his wife Marilyn, a nurse who stepped out of retirement to help out with the hotel quarantine program … and lost her life to Covid in November 2021.

Ray

Covid Roulette is a wonderfully interesting and personal record of the many ways that Covid has impacted our community in Yarra and Darebin, and we are very proud to have made the series. I really hope you have tuned in and are enjoying listening along.

Betty recently contacted us to enquire about a stall at one of our makers markets. She is looking to spread the word and sell some copies of her new cook book, My Vegan Cookbook.

Leanne will be working on ideas for our programming for the remainder of the year very soon. And we do hope Betty will book a stall with us when we have our next makers market in our calendar.

In the meantime we can help Betty by sharing her website with you. If you are interested in vegan cooking then take a look at Betty’s site here.

Hi all we’ll be starting program planning for the second half of the year next week. So if you have a course you’d like to run for our community, a group you’d like to start or a great idea or a recommendation please get in touch!

Email info@alphington.org.au.