Hi Leanne here.

Well, I feel our news this week is full of creativity and arty goodness. Which is pretty lovely. I am always so inspired when we have new things and creative things on the cards …

Kalimna and I had our first day back together onsite on Friday … it was so very nice to catch up in real life and start thinking about getting going again. And now we’ve both got lists on lists of things to do!

In the next couple of weeks we will be touching base with all our groups to discuss the path forward for each … but feel free to call us or email us too if your group has a plan and/or is feeling impatient … it’s the squeaky wheels that get attention and all (especially in the chaos of once again rebuilding and reimagining everything).

In the meantime we have two things that are definitely happening:

1. Join us for our very casual Playtime in the Garden on Wednesday from 10am … and a BBQ sausage in bread with Jill at 12pm. She’s also upped her barista skills in the last months, and we’ll be firing up the Friends of Baucau coffee machine … and seeing how that goes!

2. Then … on Friday we’re offering another outdoor opportunity to catch up. Join Katrina for Gardening Group from 10am and Arty Gardening from 10.30am (we’ll be decorating tin cans and planting up seeds and seedlings 🌱 this week). Followed by Morning Tea on the Corner with Kalimna from 11.3am.

See you soon.

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.