There are so many beautiful blooms in the neighbourhood my plan to choose ‘the best’ has fallen in a heap in just the second week!

So instead here’s a collection to admire equally!

Yesterday we had a new little street library installed out the front of ACC - not a book library this time, but a seed library!

This is a new initiative of the City of Darebin. There are four of these libraries being installed across the municipality. We’re feeling very lucky to have one of them, and we’d like to thank Natalie at Council for getting such a great project off the ground (and Tommy for making and installing the library at ACC). The little structure is super cute and a great addition to our garden and neighbourhood!

So … now you are invited to use it. You can pop past and take seeds obviously … and then, when you have them .. share some seeds from your garden.

Luckily we had some ready to go. Louise from the Fairfield Community Garden dropped off a big bag of dried out broccoli seeds still on the stems just before Christmas last year. Which we packaged up. And then Win brought some silverbeet seeds to community lunch earlier in the year for friends and fellow lunchers to take home.

if you’ve got seeds to share Darebin has provided cute little envelopes for you to put them in. They’re on the bottom shelf! You can also drop off a bag of seeds (stick them on the bottom shelf as well, with a note letting us know what they are) or leave them with us if we are onsite… and we’ll package them up into the smaller packs if you don’t get the chance yourself.

So now there’s no need to feel bad about letting your veggies go to seed! Instead think of it as an opportunity to be neighbourly. We’re looking forward to seeing more seeds in our new seed library soon. How fun. Aren’t we lucky? Happy gardening friends.

News beyond the hood today - from Oslo in fact. Find out how things have unfolded in Norway. Neighbourhoodliness from the other side of the world! The letters are just up. Pop down to the Farmers Market and collect your letter to read on the way through.

Usually at ACC our Gardening Group comes along each Friday and tends the fruit trees in our little orchard, waters and cares for the community herb gardens, wrangles the leaves (oh the leaves), turns the community compost bins and pulls up the weeds. They keep everything looking so lovely.

Yes, we are missing them!

Everything seemed okay in winter … but then spring arrived. In the last couple of weeks our garden has gone from slightly raggedy to verging on a jungle!

Anyway, neighbours, you’ll be pleased to know that this week we started the process of getting it ship-shape again. We began by weeding along the fence, tidying up the hill and sweeping the concrete.

And we’ll keep going next week until it is all back in order.

Because actually (currently hidden in the there amongst the weeds) some pretty exciting growing has been going on. And we’d like to show off. Like the plum trees. They are full of fruit this year. It’s quite a thrill - the prospect of our first real harvest!

Fingers crossed.

Hi Leanne here.

How fabulous are the neighbourhood roses? Have they always been this good? Or is it just that I now have the time to stop and smell (and photograph) them?

I saw some spectacular blooms this week. So here’s my pick (please note I have no formal training in this whatsoever! And when I say it’s a competition, it’s not really, I’m the judge, and the only way you can enter is by me passing by your fence. And then by me noticing your flowers - so in truth it’s all pretty random). But I hope you enjoy them too!

Runner up. A Fairfield entry. It’s quite lovely and gentle.

The winner. From Northcote. What do you think? The colour is amazing I reckon.