Our Children’s Week edition of Craftberry Jam has proven very popular. The project kits were out last weekend and on Thursday … and will be out again this Sunday. If you are in the neighbourhood you should pop past and collect one! Make a rocket. Decorate and stuff your own alien doll … and more! Free crafty fun for everyone.

One of our happy customers (and her mum!) on Thursday morning.

This coming week is children’s week, and we have a special ‘space’ edition of craftberry jam available for the occasion.

Make a rocket, stuff an alien … and more! Kits will be available out the front under the pergola. Just look out for our special children’s week astronaut …

Pop past to pick yours up.

This activity is presented by ACC in partnership with the Victorian government.

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.

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.

We had quite a few of our Craftberry Jam kits find their way to homes yesterday. And we made some new jars as well, so next week our flavours will include:

• Origami Craftberry Jam

• Bottle top necklace Craftberry Jam

• Collage starter pack Craftberry Jam

• Spare key windchime Craftberry Jam

• Love heart bracelet Craftberry Jam

• Make a card or 2 for someone you love Craftberry Jam

Pop past on Thursday to collect yours from 10am -4pm. If you already collected a jar and completed your craft project, we’d love the jar back. Just pop it in our collection bin next to the Street Library. Or come past next Thursday and collect a new one while you are dropping it back.

And … we’d LOVE to see the creations. Post them on Instagram with the hashtag #craftberryjam.

Lots of sparkly fun in our ‘Make a card or 2 for someone you love’ Craftberry Jam kit

A jar of bright coloured pager squares accompanied by folding instructions in our ‘Origami’ Craftberry Jam kits.

Our ‘Collage starter pack ‘ Craftberry Jam kit includes some pages of old text, and interesting images of people and things … collage can provide hours of entertainment if you take some time to explore how you are going to combine the elements together ... and add in images, shapes and backgrounds from other sources. Need some inspiration? Check out the hashtag #collage or the page @thecollageclub both on Instagram. No need to stick things down straight away, moving things around and photographing them is part of the joy.