Hi Leanne here.

Do you follow the local restaurant Facebook group Northcote, Thornbury and Fairfield Takeaway?

If so you will know that lots of local restaurants had already stocked up on food for one of their busiest days of the year (Valentine’s Day) and have now had to cancel the bookings at the last minute.

So, if like me, you have a valentine (or 1 adult valentine + 3 valentine children as the case may be) in your house, and are feeling a bit lazy on the home cooking front, this weekend is the ideal time to grab some fancier restaurant takeaway and support the businesses that would usually be full.

And, don’t forget the florists. I saw the Bivianos florists working hard Friday morning, and can imagine how disappointed they will be feeling this weekend … (I am assuming they are still open?).

Anyway, we may be stuck at home … but we can still be romantic right? Right. For sure.

Fancy food from Estelle on High Street … one of the local restaurants going back to takeaway this weekend. Make the most of this non-cooking excuse, get out your fancy tableware … and maybe rope your kids into serving (unlikely at my house, they’ll just want to eat for sure, but I can live in hope for a second or two).

We are hoping that some local people might have an abundance of fruit or vegetables from their garden they would like to send our way.

Last year we had a once-a-month preserving session at ACC on Friday morning. And we’re keen to start it back up again.

So if you have extra zucchini or cucumbers, stone fruit … or anything else we could turn into pickles or chutneys or jams please let us know as we have some keen local volunteers waiting to get to work :-)

This term our garden is open for young families to come and have a play on Wednesday mornings from 10am-12pm.

We’ve got the sandpit open, the toys out, ride-ons at the ready and some crafty activities set up.

If you’re looking for a change from the local park you can pop past with a coffee from the cafe, or an icy pole from the milkbar, and make yourself at home.

Keen to get to know others in the neighbourhood? Join us for community gardening or community craft each Friday morning from 10am … and then share morning tea out on the corner from 11.30am. You’re welcome to come along for any part of this low key community-building morning.

We’ll be starting a new yarn bombing project with community craft participants inside - all skills (and no skills) gratefully received - at the very least everyone’s always keen for a chat! And the garden needs some love after our month of holidays if you’d like to be active outside for an hour or so.

We hope to see you here in 2021!

All or our book clubs are recommencing for the year this month. We run 5 book clubs (Kalimna here and Jody at Darebin Libraries do a fabulous job of juggling and managing the confusion of books and people and loans and return dates) and we have a couple of spots left in our Monday and Tuesday evening groups.

So if you’d like to get together once a month with a group of local folk to chat about a book (and make neighbourhood friends) you can sign up here.

It costs $60 per year to join.