How cool! This week I headed over to Reservoir Neighbourhood House for our monthly Darebin Neighbourhood House Network meeting and Angie and Lia proudly showed us the amazing community artworks going in on the walls of the local public housing just next door - that they have commissioned utilising a State Government grant.

Six new murals are at various stages of completion. Each is designed by a different artist and each has creative input from the people who live in the building … whose home is being transformed. Clare (who is also working with us on Friday and running Arty Gardening) is a key part of this project, which is an element of the broader Reservoir Revitalisation project.

I came home to our house inspired to start a new community art project of some sort here … it looks great doesn’t it.

When Mubarek’s dad got Covid his family was taken aback by how sick he became. Find out more and listen to his Covid story from our website here.

Or you can listen on the Apple podcast service here … or look us up on your favourite podcast service.

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.

Hi it’s Leanne here.

It’s not everyday we have exciting new ideas 💡 (well maybe it is - we’re often planning new things) but it’s definitely not everyday that we also get the money to implement our exciting ideas!

However, we recently succeeded in getting a grant from the State Government for our new project - Covid Roulette - and we are now running at full steam to get it completed by mid May - when the funding needs to be expended.

Covid Roulette is a podcast series documenting the lived experience of Covid in our neighbourhood and more broadly across Darebin and Yarra.

As you have all probably experienced yourselves in the last few months, Covid is pretty much everywhere in our community and most of us now have our own Covid story in our family or friendship group.

What we are trying to do in our series is to capture an interesting mix of these stories, highlighting a range of social, emotional, economic and health impacts associated with catching Covid … for posterity, but also to enable us all to hear and understand the impacts for others, and hopefully encourage those who are still feeling vaccine hesitant to learn more about the disease through neighbourhood stories and understand better the gamut of risks that Covid poses.

We’re already well into recording and today we started publishing. You can find our first episode - Polly - on our website here … or on Spotify, Google, Apple and Amazon podcast/music services.

And … if you have a story you would like to share please let us know. You can email me here.

You might be a mum who has felt the burden of parenthood as the primary carer in these times, a person who couldn’t work while isolating and experienced economic impacts, someone who got quite sick, or had weird symptoms or someone who is experiencing long-covid etc. You might have a personal story and a professional perspective you could share.

From the dramatic to the mundane to the heartfelt … we’d really love to hear from you!

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.