What Do You Want Your Community Garden To Be?

I know, quite along winded title but it's a question I want everyone to think about? What do you want your community garden to be?

For us who regularly attend, I can say on behalf of all that it's about friendship and being able to garden effectively. It's a place that brings connection through a passion for gardening and nature.

It's truly an amazing place and with recent groups such as Early Years Care who come along and enjoy the space, it makes it an even more valuable and special place for the extended community.

As I express what the garden means to me I want you to think about what it means to you.

The most obvious thing about a garden is the planting, growth and the harvest of food and plants. However, there are other things that grow as a by product such as, friendship, learning new skills, eating well, creativity of many kinds and a sense of joy to be alive.

One of the creative things that have grown organically within the space is the idea of performing a pantomime. What the heck??? Non of us are experts in the field of performing but we are going to give it a go. See what I mean? We have nurtured a can do attitude!

For me personally, I have enjoyed the freedom to paint, create, sing a song, build teepee's, mosaic, watch other people cook, make friends and have my world enlarged.

My vision is to see the space become an out door class room for many different groups for all ages. I would love to start getting people engaged with creative activities or maybe it can be a space where people can picnic and have a rest from what ever bothers them. Community gardens are awesome and I greatly encourage others to be involved and to hopefully show how not only is it about gardening but it's so much more if you let it

We often eat well

And the creativity is shared

and we have our community groups

Panorama Love

So a funny thing happened to me yesterday, I accidentally found that I could do panoramic photo's on my iphone. Wow, such a revelation. So with that in mind I took a whole heap of pictures of the garden. I had so much fun.

Extensions

Exciting things are happening at the garden at the moment as we are getting extensions, meaning more storage, seating and a space to comfortably cook stuff. As the new additions take place, I'm sure that they will create a cosy atmosphere that will give a homely feeling to the place.

Not saying that its not already a homely feel!!!

More images as the weeks go by.

Happy 1st Birthday Albion Park Community Garden

Today it was my privilege to attend the first birthday of the Community Garden at Albion Park. Now those folk know how to put on a feast!!!!!! I mistakenly failed to take a picture of the awesome spread that was provided for gardeners and visitors. You just have to believe me that so many delicious meals came out of their lovely little garden. I did however get this shot!

It's so wonderful to see volunteers who enthusiastically attend weekly and have a great rapport with each other, as a result there is a fantastic garden that the community has assess to.

A big mention to Ross, Ainslie and Chris for their vision and leadership in getting the garden to happen.

Well, thanks for the party guys, you fed me well today xxx

Stuffed Zucchini

One of the nicest pleasures of being involved with the community garden is the introduction of new recipes to my repertoire. 

For example, I have never before had access to humongous sized zucchini's before!! So when we picked them I'm like "what do you do with these babies???" I was then informed that one could stuff and bake them so I gave it a go.

For this particular recipe I made it up.

Ingredients

• A very big zucchini
• onion
• Tin of tuna
• rice
• tin or fresh tomatoes
• egg
• herbs
• veggie stock
• cheese

The how too

• boil rice
• fry onion
• mix tuna, rice, tomatoes, egg, onions into a bowl
• scrape seeds out of zucchini and make a nice little canoe
• pop mixed ingredients into the zucchini
• top with grated cheese
• pop onto a preheated oven 180deg
• Depending on how you like it, give it 50min or if your like me bake it until the zucchini is soft

There you go, I hope this is clear enough!!

Sharing the Harvest

Cliff Came up with a top idea for our excess produce and was able to hand over a lot of food to a local charity called The Food Barn Warrawong, which is connected to The Hope Centre.

This is yet another positive and wonderful way of how a community garden can impact the neighbourhood and society. As people are increasingly finding it hard to keep up with bills or even find somewhere to live, community gardens is one of many solutions I believe that can address the mentioned crisis.

More focus and execution of such projects need to be implemented as this demonstrates a positive solution to an ever growing problem of families being short of cash. The reason why its important; is a community garden promotes friendship,  food education, innovation, hope and being able to obtain a yield. 

With that yield comes food, recipes, confidence, a sense of joy and being able to give back to the community and these things should never be underestimated!!