Local artist Rose Kulak did an fabulous job this year replacing our Science Week in-person eco-dyeing workshop with a take home kit. Over 20 families collected the kits from us. I know I’ll never look at sour grass (oxalis) now without thinking about the amazing colours it can produce in a dye bath.

As a follow-up Rose has now put together a second kit that is an introduction to contact printing with natural dyes … onion skins, eucalyptus leaves etc. The kit includes all the materials you will need along with a step by step instruction sheet … it will make a wonderful weekend or mid-week project.

If you emailed us previously for one of these kits please pop in and collect it this week. If you haven’t put your name down but would like to collect a kit and have a go please email us here.

And thanks again Rose for sharing your skills. What a great community we live in!

What did you miss the most in lockdown? For me (apart from friends and family of course) it was rifling through others people’s junk! So I am excited to see this garage sale coming up … thanks for sending your flyer through Catriona.

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!

We’re creating a set of building blocks for everyone to play with … featuring the houses in our neighbourhood. And we’re hoping you’ll help us out, by picking up a block from our collection bin, drawing your house on it with a black sharpie and returning it to us. Then we’ll add some colour … and a roof.

Look out for our community arts bins out on the corner over the next few days and join in.

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.